Pandemic Humor: Digital Prosociality for the Epidemic Socius

Chapter 2 examines digital humor practices on the Chinese internet during SARS and argues for the community-building and sociality-affirming functions of nonpolitics-driven epidemic humor. The chapter explores how epidemic humor was pervasive across both personal digitized networks and public internet forums during SARS, highlighting how people told and shared jokes about epidemic life in order to broaden the range of the sayable about infectious disease and lower the stakes of everyday epidemic expression. The chapter focuses on several new subgenres (SARS greetings, SARS sweet-talk, SARS folk recipes, SARS mimic poems, and SARS fanfiction) and theorizes them as small humor—the humor of deliberately bad jokes, forced puns, and silly buffooneries that channel gentle and generous laughter as a prosocial act, creating shared bonds amid pandemic strife. The chapter coda discusses the revival of this digital pandemic humor culture during COVID-19 and the Wuhan lockdown.