Pakistani Political Memes and Social Awareness: A Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

The political meme is a new trend in Pakistan that has emerged in the fast-paced digital world. The mix of humor, irony, and drawing creativity provides these memes with a very potent tool of mass commentary and participation. The current research intends to identify the pragmatic aspect and the communicative strategies used in Pakistani political memes and how sarcasm, humor and irony help in creating social awareness. The study is based on the transference of the meaning and realistic situation of Pakistani government officials to the public. The current research took a qualitative and pragmatic discourse-analytic method and examined a corpus of 100 memes circulated on the top social media channels including Facebook, Twitter (X) and Instagram in 2022-24. The analysis was based on practical aspects like speech acts, implicature, politeness violation and multimodal irony. The results of the research have indicated that Pakistani political memes often violate Gricean maxims and use indirect speech acts to criticize power, challenge authority and reveal social contradictions. Interaction of both verbal and visual helps to contribute to the humorous and ironic coloring that allows spreading socially-acceptable messages with a political coloring. The study recommends that political memes in Pakistan can be used as an entertainment medium as well as a means of digital activism and education and shows how humor can be a kind of social commentary in the modern online communication environment.