”Time flies when you are stuck at home, broke, drunk and full of existential dread”: En reflexiv etnografisk betraktelse kring humor ochsamlande under Covid-19 pandemin

This article discusses the way folklorists and ethnologists gathered online during the Covid-19 pandemic to collect and share online humour. The ethnographers’ instinct during aglobal crisis was to immediately start documenting emerging cultural expressions, particu-larly digital humour. They came together in Facebook groups aimed more or less explicitlyto function as collective collection efforts. Working from the old ethos of ”digging whereyou stand”, the types of humour that was collected in these groups reflect what social classethnographers belong to, and what life situations they found themselves in under a pan-demic. The memes and other jokes that were shared were to a large degree about workingfrom home, dealing with videoconferences and e.g. taking care of children all at the sametime. This means there will be huge blind spots in the kind of data the collections represent:there is little to no ”dark” humour in these groups. At the same time, these groups wereobviously not only collections or archives. Just as much, they became coffee table conversa-tions of the kind so many of us missed dearly while being denied the normalcy of office life.