When metaphor becomes a joke: Metaphor journeys from political ads to internet memes

- Shows that metaphor and humor converge in framing evaluation in discourse.
- Introduces a new category of humorous metaphors: recycled humorous metaphors.
- Highlights the conceptual and rhetorical power of the journey metaphor in politics.
- Adds to the growing body of knowledge on political humor and social media.
- Empirically corroborates the compatibility between metaphor and humor theories.

The relationship between metaphor and humor has long been viewed as one of conceptual similarity in that both phenomena dwell on duality, yet they process it in a different way; metaphor fully resolves the tension between domains while humor does so only partially. This paper aims to offer a novel understanding of this issue by suggesting that metaphor and humor converge, instead, vis-à-vis their evaluative function in discourse. The empirical evidence under examination comes from three political ads that were used for election campaign advertizing in Greece in 2015, each one building on a different scenario of the journey metaphor (i.e., a train trip, a flight and a taxi ride), and their humorous representations in internet memes that were spread through social media platforms. Aiming to parody the political parties and figures in the political ads, the memes recast the metaphorical conceptualization involved therein in a humorous way, thus giving rise to what I wish to call 'recycled humorous metaphors' (cf. Attardo, 2015). The analysis shows that metaphor and humor serve the particular rhetorical goals of election campaign advertizing and political satire; metaphor through the evaluative frames it evokes and humor through its targets and its function as a means of criticism.