The Pragmatics of Digital Political Humour: A Multimodal Implicature Analysis of Donald Trump's 2024 Presidential Campaign Posts

Abstract

Applying Grice's Cooperative Principle and multimodal discourse analysis, this research scrutinizes the pragmatics of digital political humour in Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign Facebook posts. It examines how such posts flout or violate Conversational Maxims to generate satirical and ironic implicatures against political opponents. It also shows what pragmatic functions like visual textual incongruities serve in social media humour. A purposive data of six humourous multimodal posts is analyzed through a three-step framework comprising denotative visual textual description, identification of the pragmatic mechanism, and interpretation of the political communicative function. The findings of the study reveal a clear hierarchy of mechanisms; flouting the Maxim of Quality predominates, occurring in four of the six posts. Whereby exaggeration and literalized falsehood voice aggressive accusations under the deniability of humour. Moreover,  the multimodal presupposition operates jointly with image and caption or text to smuggle delegitimizing content past refutation and  flouting the Maxims of Manner and Relevance, together with Relevance Theory incongruity, rewards the cognitive effort of resolving visual textual clashes with strong contextual effects. The dominant strategy is Quality-flouting joint with presupposition in the facility of delegitimising the opponent, added by solidarity building. The study concludes that visual textual incongruity constitutes the primary payload of digital political humour by converting entertainment into political attack and persuasion.