The Pragmatics of Coronavirus Motivated Humour on the Social Media
Humour, an established means of reducing stress and tension, has attracted scholarly attention over the years. In the Nigerian discourse context, studies on Coronavirus-Motivated Humour (CMH) are relatively new. This paper investigates humour that reflect the social, economic and health challenges in Nigeria shared through the social media in order to identify CMH as a form of humour through which real-life experiences of other people can be understood. Insights are drawn from Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts Theory to analyse a total of seven purposively selected humour on Coronavirus from social media, specifically Whatsapp and Facebook. The study found out that the pragmatic relevance of CMH is embedded in its social functions as it serves as an indicator of the sense of citizens’ freedom and a pract of warning to the corrupt and inefficient leaders in Nigeria, particularly on health facilities in the country. Also, the context of CMH construction presents it as a satire of the social, economic and health experiences of the people as it reduces and reinforces status differences as well as strengthens the feeling of connectedness among people. This is achieved through the practs of informing, satirizing and mocking. The paper concludes that humours do not only make people laugh, but also comment on certain societal maladies that finger the minds of Nigerian citizens. Keywords: Coronavirus, Humour, Social Media, Pragmatics and Lockdown.