Go Ahead, Joke about the Pandemic: The Public-Health Power of Humor on Black Twitter

In this editorial, Yale ecologist C. Brandon Ogbunu explores how Black Twitter functioned as a distinctive mode of pandemic storytelling. Defined as a loosely connected yet culturally coherent online community, Black Twitter offered real-time narrative responses to COVID-19, blending humor and critique. Ogbunu situates these responses as a form of collective life writing—immediate, participatory, and grounded in lived experience.

He highlights viral memes such as calling the virus “the ’Rona” or labeling the Omicron variant “Omarion” as more than comic relief. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Ogbunu frames Black humor as a historical strategy for confronting systemic trauma. During the pandemic, this humor also served public-health functions: countering misinformation, reducing anxiety, and promoting vaccine uptake. Notably, despite early vaccine hesitancy, African Americans had among the fastest-rising vaccination rates by 2021—a shift Ogbunu links to Black Twitter’s accessible, culturally resonant communication.

COVID-19, he argues, is the first pandemic shaped by social media, and Black Twitter exemplifies how humor-infused digital storytelling can foster both psychological resilience and epidemiological literacy.