ABSTRACT
Placing humour and its public performance in its wider cultural context, this chapter looks at the criticality of humorous memes circulating on the internet. From healing rituals to folk stories and to widely circulating yarns from when the internet did not exist, Sri Lanka has a long tradition in humour that works as entertainment as well as a matter of public spectacle and community-building and as a weapon of the weak. The present memes have appeared at a time when Sri Lanka faces multiple socio-political crises, while the nature of the public spaces that would have ordinarily allowed people to engage with these issues have also shrunk. These memes work as mostly anonymous public critiques of ongoing political events and processes, and need to be taken as serious engagement with politics given the contemporary conditions of the public sphere.
