ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the political meme as those image(s) and/or text symbioses that reference government leaders, political action, or other political/politicized topics with the intention to communicate a message through a humorous guise. It aims to illustrate the visual intertextual nature of memes and discuss the role of memes in modern political discourse, including how memes have been employed in democratic and non-democratic societies. The chapter deals with reflections on limitations and possible future directions for appreciating the rapidly evolving phenomena that comprise the multi- and cross-texted visual within media. Visual forms can simultaneously render a multitude of significations, thus rendering varying experiences of the world. This focus on intertextuality and the question of meaning then to the adoption of the term by various fields concerned with decoding and encoding text(s). Humor in political memes serves as a visual metaphor referring to serious political issues in specific social conditions.
