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Multimodal Humour: Integrating Blending Model, Relevance Theory, and Incongruity Theory

  • Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

    Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He was previously a guest lecturer at the Association of Critical Education in Wrocław, Poland. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Łódź, Poland, and is a former lecturer at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He is also founding editor and coeditor of the John Benjamins journal Moral Cognition and Communication. He has published internationally in a number of journals, such as Discourse and Society, Information Design Journal, Metaphor and the Social World, Pragmatics and Cognition, Visual Communication Quarterly, and Sciences de la Société. Moreover, he is a regular contributor to international news outlets, including The Guardian, Forbes, The Newnan Times-Herald, The Jerusalem Post, The Commentator, and Inside Sources, among others.

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 22. März 2018

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss humorous political cartoons contingent on pictorial and textual components, with the heuristic apparatus provided by Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books) conceptual blending theory. Blending is discussed in reference to three approaches to humour known in topical literature, viz. bisociation (Koestler, 1964. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson), the incongruity-resolution model (Suls, 1972, A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information processing analysis. In: The Psychology of Humor, J. Goldstein and P. McGhee (Eds.), 81–100. New York: Academic Press; 1983, Cognitive processes in humour appreciation. In: Handbook of Humour Research, Vol. 1, P. McGhee and J. Goldstein (Eds.), 39–57. New York: Springer), and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995, Relevance Theory: Communication and Cognition. 2nd. Blackwell: Oxford; Yus, 2003, Humour and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9):1295–1331; 2016, Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Here, a corpus of 45 multimodal cartoons on the West is examined. A detailed discussion of examples aims to testify to the widespread and multifarious applicability of the incongruity-relevance-blending approach to the analysis of humorous cartoons. Additionally, an attempt is made to explain the difference between humorous and non-humorous blends.

About the author

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He was previously a guest lecturer at the Association of Critical Education in Wrocław, Poland. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Łódź, Poland, and is a former lecturer at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He is also founding editor and coeditor of the John Benjamins journal Moral Cognition and Communication. He has published internationally in a number of journals, such as Discourse and Society, Information Design Journal, Metaphor and the Social World, Pragmatics and Cognition, Visual Communication Quarterly, and Sciences de la Société. Moreover, he is a regular contributor to international news outlets, including The Guardian, Forbes, The Newnan Times-Herald, The Jerusalem Post, The Commentator, and Inside Sources, among others.

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Published Online: 2018-3-22

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