With the growing awareness of the contribution of parasites to life, their influences on humans also become clearer. The parasite’s footprints can be seen everywhere, in genetics, epidemiology, medicine, history and, as this stream of research clarifies, parasites play a vivid part in our cultural imagination surrounding popular entertainment.

What kind of cultural work does the parasite do in fiction and film? What kind of aesthetic achievements does it make possible? What parasites, and based on what characteristics, have produced comic cultural fantasies?

Zombies, Jokers and pandemic internet memes not only reflect the diffusion of cultural ideas of science and medical constructs into the public realm, they can also serve as a middle-ground mental landscape to explore and share medical concepts with the public.

What can viral jokes about pandemics that involve zombies and Jokers tell us about public understandings of the spread of diseases?

Discover our academic paper “From circus acts to violent clowns: The parasite as performer”!

^{The fantastic as the impossible, the counter-rational and the unreal cannot exist without the world of the real, the possible, the rational to which it has a ‘parasitic dependence’.}

Renate Lachmann

Pop culture has always played a role in shaping cultural ideas of science and in exciting the public imagination about science-related themes. Cultural interpretations of epidemiology and virology contribute to the public discourse on diseases and their spread, especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic. What has rarely been explored in these contexts, however, are comic cultural imaginaries of pandemics.

What ideas of infectious diseases, science and humour are evoked and conveyed by viral jokes about pandemics in popular communication, which juxtapose and compare our current crisis with well-known films and pop cultural characters?

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