The era of User Generated Content (USG) on Social Networks has invested different areas of human experience, including one of the highest levels of education, i.e., the PhD grade. As regards the opportunity to “imitate” a virtual content, the phenomenon of Memes (Shifman, J Vis Cult 13(3):340–358, 56) is spreading. The present research aims at the understanding how the online functions and practices of humor signification are featured considering linguistic and visual aspects. In particular it has a twofold goals: a) analyzing which differences emerged in terms of functions and emotions between humor in PhD Memes on Facebook and Instagram by means of ‘diatextual’ analysis; b) performing a fine-grained qualitative analysis about rethorical aspects based on linguistic and visual elements of Phd Memes in order to contribute to the field of humor automatic detection. To satisfy these purposes, 70 memes about the PhD on Facebook and Instagram were collected and, then, analyzed in two levels: (1) the quanti-qualitative, aiming to detect the semi-automatic emotional involvement, expression of humor in “meme discourses”; (2) the semiotic analysis of meme images. The results highlight first of all typical cases of incongruences in automatic and diatextual analysis in coding the effective emotions; furthermore they also show the peculiar function of humor, mediated by communication through memes, which is mainly a kind of ‘emotional sharing’ consisting in the complaint against a complex and precarious career path; in addition some differences in relation to the type of social media (Facebook or Instagram) are reported.

社交网络上用户生成内容（USG）的时代已经投入了人类经验的不同领域，其中包括最高学历之一，即博士学位。关于“模仿”虚拟内容的机会，模因现象（Shifman，J Vis Cult 13（3）：340-358，56）正在蔓延。本研究旨在了解如何考虑语言和视觉方面的幽默功能的在线功能和做法。具体而言，它具有双重目标：a）通过“文字分析”分析，分析在Facebook和Instagram上的博士模因中幽默在功能和情感方面出现了哪些差异；b）根据Phd Memes的语言和视觉元素对理论方面进行细粒度的定性分析，以促进幽默自动检测领域。为了满足这些目的，收集了有关Facebook和Instagram博士的70个模因，然后分两个层次进行了分析：（1）定量定性，旨在检测半自动的情感参与，“模因话语”中的幽默表达。 ”；（2）对模因图像的符号学分析。研究结果首先强调了在自动和变通分析中编码有效情感时所有不一致的典型案例。此外，它们还表现出幽默感的特殊功能，它是通过模因交流来介导的，主要是一种“情感共享”，包括对复杂而不稳定的职业道路的抱怨。