#staystrongmelbs: Collective identity unleashed by an earthquake

Humor is widely recognized as a way to process and deal with disasters and tragic events. This is particularly the case in our digital age: political controversies, wars, natural disasters, and other crises, such as COVID-19, often lead to the rapid proliferation of creative and amusing memes as a digital response mechanism, creating a sense of community and levity and an outlet for anxiety and frustration in participatory digital cultures. While it turned out to be relatively minor, the earthquake that shook Melbourne in September 2021 during the city’s sixth COVID-19 lockdown prompted an outpouring of multimodal humor on Australian social media, becoming a memetic moment (Smith and Copland 2022). Humorous tweets and memes began circulating just moments after the tremors stopped, and continued unabated for several days, much of it linking the earthquake to the lockdowns in Melbourne. Using multimodal digital discourse analysis, this article will analyze a selection of interconnected sociopolitical tweets, memes, and other online humor that circulated in the week of September 22, 2021, as a result of the earthquake. By focusing primarily on the semiotic, linguistic, and pragmatic elements (intertextuality, wordplay, incongruity), it will be shown how the humor in these multimodal examples was not just performing as a coping mechanism for the earthquake, but as a creative way of engaging with current political issues to create a sense of collective identity. This article will illustrate the construction of the social identity of Melbourne as a strong and resilient city following an earthquake experienced during the pandemic.<p></p>