Funny corona beer meme

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment. See Linked Data.

HIST30060 - submitted as part of a history assignment. This meme uses symbolism in order to compare the pandemic to disastrous world events. The background depicts an atomic bomb exploding into a mushroom cloud and is overlaid with photographs of an empty toilet roll (alluding to the rush on toilet paper that occurred early in 2020), a bottle of Corona beer (a company unfortunate enough to share a name with the virus), empty shelves (from where people had panicked bought), graphics of the virus and the muppet Elmo wearing a mask, looking into the middle distance. The combination of these graphics suggests that in the future, ‘corona’ will be inextricably linked to the virus and that just saying its name will induce traumatic flashbacks. This suggests that the collective experience of wider society this year could be deemed a sort of shared trauma. It is noteworthy that the vast majority these memes, this one included, do not make light of personal hardships faced by people in order to be malicious and the events alluded to (such as the food hoarding) are not “serious” (like, for example, the economic crisis or the coronavirus death toll) but more trivial inconveniences.

May 17, 2020

Emily Shallcross

HIST30060

University of Melbourne

Meme (found on Pinterest)

English Humor

English Education--Universities

English Social Media (including Memes)

meme

disaster

Pinterest

Melbourne

mask

beer

toilet paper

Humor

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05/17/2020