Humour, Lego, and "AI Slop": What Wartime Memes Mean for Crisis and Risk Communicators

Plastic toy figures. Rap videos. GTA-style missile edits. In the Iran–US–Israel confrontation of 2025 and 2026, some of the most strategically effective communication has looked nothing like communication at all. It has looked like content. Entertainment. A laugh.

For crisis, risk, and emergency communication professionals, this is not background noise. It is the new operating environment.

Wartime memes are a crisis communication problem because they set the interpretive frame before any official message can land. By the time an organisation issues a statement, most stakeholders have already encountered two or three competing narratives — often packaged as entertainment.

Humour has always been a wartime tool. British broadcasters mocked Hitler on radio during World War Two. Cartoonists on both sides drew grotesque caricatures of enemy leaders. Comic books turned Axis powers into bumbling villains for young readers. The underlying psychology is not new. What changed is the form, the velocity, and the audience size.

In the current Iran–US–Israel conflict, this plays out across three distinct streams:

The key insight for practitioners: the public's baseline understanding of a crisis is now heavily shaped by content that looks like entertainment, not information.

Wartime humour works by giving people emotional distance from material that would otherwise be overwhelming — and that function is real, legitimate, and worth understanding.

Three mechanisms drive most of what we see.

Coping and anxiety reduction. Humour is a classic psychological defence. It lets people approach frightening material — war, escalation, mass casualties — without being consumed by it. Dark jokes and satirical edits offer a sense of symbolic control: we can laugh at this, so it cannot entirely dominate us. For citizens under fire, this can be genuinely protective. For those watching from afar, it keeps them emotionally engaged with a conflict that might otherwise feel too remote or too heavy.

Group bonding and identity signalling. Laughing together is powerful. Wartime memes encode in-group knowledge: shared references, slang, collective grievances. They answer the question, "whose side are you on?" without ever asking it directly. When Iranian Lego videos mock, or Israeli TikToks ridicule, they are not just attacking opponents. They are reinforcing an in-group identity — we are clever, resilient, and right; they are clumsy, corrupt, or ridiculous.

Ridicule as a weapon. Turning a feared actor into a clown lowers perceived threat and boosts confidence. It channels fear and anger into laughter. And crucially, it gives people an emotionally satisfying way to "win" against powerful adversaries without having to do anything at all.

Research on political memes published in the Journal of Social Media + Society (2023) found that exposure to politically charged memes influences attitudes and group identity formation — effects that were often underestimated by audiences who believed they were simply being entertained. (Source: Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231205588)

The most dangerous effect of wartime humour is not the misinformation it spreads — it is the desensitisation it quietly produces over time.

Repeated exposure to stylised or humorous depictions of violence reduces emotional responsiveness. This is not a theory. It is one of the better-documented phenomena in media psychology. When missile strikes, assassinations, and mass casualties are wrapped in Lego aesthetics, gaming metaphors, or snarky captions, audiences gradually:

What was once unthinkable becomes ambient. War becomes content. Escalation becomes just more material to remix.

For risk communicators trying to signal genuine thresholds — this incident is different; this escalation creates new dangers — that is a serious structural problem. You are speaking into an environment where audiences have been trained, gradually and almost invisibly, to process war as entertainment.

As Philippe Borremans, founder of RiskComms and crisis communication specialist with 25 years of experience, observes: "You are not competing with misinformation. You are competing with a joke that landed three hours before your press release. The frame is already set."

Crisis communicators operating in a meme-saturated environment need to make four practical shifts: develop memetic situational awareness, account for partial desensitisation in message design, establish clear internal humour policies before the next crisis, and resist the temptation to fight on the enemy's terrain.

Develop memetic situational awareness. Official briefings no longer sit at the top of the information hierarchy. They arrive late, into a conversation that has already formed. That means monitoring needs to expand beyond false claims. Track recurring joke formats. Map the caricatures circulating about your organisation, your partners, and at-risk groups. These shape trust and perceived competence just as powerfully as outright disinformation.

A 2018 study published in Science by researchers at MIT found that false news spreads significantly faster and wider than true news on social media — largely because novelty and emotional arousal drive sharing behaviour. Humorous content exploits both. (Source: The Spread of True and False News Online — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559)

Account for partial desensitisation. You will face overlapping audiences: people who are exhausted and use jokes to keep functioning; people who are sincerely engaged but whose first reaction to new information is an ironic one-liner; people whose empathy has been blunted by months of stylised violent content. Do not assume the facts will speak for themselves. They will not, in an environment where facts compete with spectacle. Mark thresholds deliberately. Use phrases like "for the first time…" and "this crosses a line because…". Keep bringing communication back to real people, real relationships, real consequences.

Set an internal humour policy before the next crisis. Agree in advance on when — if ever — your organisation will use humour in official crisis messaging. Which topics are strictly off-limits? How will you handle others' humour about you — ignore it, correct it, or reset with calm factual content? These calls cannot be made well at 2 a.m. on the first night of a major incident. Make them now, in writing, with sign-off from leadership.

Do not fight on the enemy's terrain. Weaponised humour will target institutions, spokespeople, and subject matter experts. The temptation is to clap back. That almost always helps opponents, not you. Focus on credibility and steadiness instead. You can acknowledge criticism without adopting its tone. Reserve whatever humour capital you have for lower-stakes, preparedness-oriented contexts where lightness serves genuine engagement — not for the middle of an active crisis.

A World Bank research paper on humour and risk communication (2021) noted that humour can be effective for increasing engagement and recall in preparedness contexts, but cautioned strongly against its use when the communication involves acute harm, vulnerable populations, or high-stakes decisions. (Source: Humor and Risk: Exploring a New Tool for Communication and Engagement — https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/884411622710878616/pdf/Humor-and-Risk-Exploring-a-New-Tool-for-Communication-and-Engagement.pdf)

Crisis communicators can use humour — but only in specific contexts, with clear institutional boundaries, and never around casualties, vulnerable groups, or high-impact events.

Grassroots humour by affected communities serves a real and legitimate psychological function. People under pressure need to cope. Mocking that impulse, or trying to co-opt it, is both paternalistic and professionally risky. The job of crisis communication is not to police how people feel. It is to provide clarity, credibility, empathy, and actionable guidance.

Institutional humour is a different matter. Official accounts joining the meme stream in the middle of a crisis create a distinct impression — and not usually the one intended. Humorous responses to serious harm can be rapidly reframed as callousness, arrogance, or incompetence, especially when clips are taken out of context and remixed.

Where humour does have a legitimate role: preparedness campaigns, low-stakes disruptions, and community engagement where the aim is to reduce anxiety and increase reach. Even there, the bar should be high. Know the audience. Test the message. And have a fallback.

Monitoring for meme-based narrative risk requires expanding your intelligence picture beyond traditional media tracking to include short-form video trends, recurring joke formats, and satirical caricatures circulating about your organisation or sector.

Practical starting points:

As of 2026, the emotional and cognitive baseline of crisis communication audiences is being shaped by content that blends war, comedy, and AI-generated spectacle at a scale no practitioner toolkit was designed for. That is the new ground. The question is what to do with it.

The lesson from Iran's Lego videos, US meme edits, and Israeli TikTok humour is not that crisis communicators should all become meme strategists. It is something more important and more difficult.

Our publics are not blank slates waiting for our next message. They arrive carrying emotional residue from content streams we did not create and cannot control. They have been trained — gradually, persistently — to process extraordinary events as entertainment.

Our job is to understand that baseline. To respect the coping function that humour legitimately serves for people under pressure. And to refuse to contribute to the desensitisation and trivialisation of real harm.

Communication that cuts through irony does not try to out-joke the jokers. It tells the truth, clearly and consistently, to people who are exhausted by spectacle and quietly ready for something real.

What are wartime memes, and why do they matter for crisis communicators? Wartime memes are short-form digital content — videos, images, and jokes — that frame military or political events through humour, satire, or pop-culture references. They matter because they shape public interpretation of events before official communication arrives, often setting frames that are difficult to dislodge.

Are states actually using memes as deliberate propaganda tools? Yes. In the 2025–2026 Iran–US–Israel conflict, all three parties have produced or promoted content that blends humour, military imagery, and cultural references to shape domestic and international opinion. This continues a long tradition of wartime psychological operations, updated for short-form video platforms.

What is the difference between coping humour and institutional humour? Coping humour originates with affected communities and serves a real psychological function — it helps people manage fear and maintain group cohesion. Institutional humour is produced by organisations in official contexts. The two operate very differently. Institutional humour during acute crises involving casualties or vulnerable groups almost always creates more problems than it solves.

What is memetic situational awareness? Memetic situational awareness is the practice of actively monitoring the joke formats, satirical frames, and caricatures circulating around an issue or organisation — not just the factual claims and media coverage. It gives communicators a clearer picture of the emotional environment they are entering when they publish a message.

How does wartime humour contribute to desensitisation? Repeated exposure to violence wrapped in humour or gaming aesthetics gradually reduces emotional responsiveness. Audiences begin to experience extraordinary events as ordinary content. This makes it harder for communicators to signal genuine escalation or genuine danger when it arises.

Should organisations ever respond to memes that mock them? Rarely, and almost never in kind. Attempting to match the tone of satirical attacks usually amplifies them. A calm, factual reset is almost always more effective than a clap-back. If the meme contains a false factual claim, correct the claim. If it is purely tonal, consider ignoring it.

How do I build meme monitoring into my crisis intelligence function? Start by adding a short-form video and meme category to your existing media monitoring brief. Identify the platforms most relevant to your audience — TikTok, Instagram Reels, Reddit, Telegram. Track recurring formats and emotional framings, not just mentions. Treat humorous caricatures of your organisation with the same seriousness as factual attacks.

What role do AI-generated videos play in this landscape? AI-generated or AI-assisted content — including "AI slop" (low-quality synthetic media) — dramatically lowers the production cost of propaganda and satire. Anyone can now produce a passable Lego-style propaganda video in minutes. This means the volume of meme content in any future conflict will be significantly higher than what we have seen before.

How should I write crisis communications for a partially desensitised audience? Use explicit threshold markers ("this is different because…"), human-scale examples that re-anchor audiences to real consequences, and clear structure that makes it easy to extract the core message even for readers in a distracted or ironic frame of mind.

Where can I learn more about meme-aware crisis communication? The Wag the Dog Newsletter by Philippe Borremans covers emerging practice in crisis, risk, and emergency communication — including the intersection of AI, information warfare, and narrative intelligence. Visit wagthedog.io for current issues and archives.

Philippe Borremans is a crisis, risk, and emergency communication specialist with 25 years of experience and founder of RiskComms. He publishes the Wag the Dog Newsletter at wagthedog.io, covering emerging practice at the intersection of AI, information warfare, and crisis communication.