Humour During Trump's Presidency: The Power of Cartoons

نوع المستند : أبحاث علمیة

المؤلف

قسم اللغة الإنجليزية كلية الآداب جامعة السويس

المستخلص

The paper is a linguistic study of the power of humorous political cartoons. It aims at contributing to the understanding of political cartoons and humour. It attempts to investigate humorous political cartoons from a multimodal perspective. A thorough analysis of selected Pinterest political cartoons published during Trump's presidency is carried out employing Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH). An interview is conducted to a group of participants (10 males and 10 females between the age of 25 to 35 with different specialties) to elicit data about their understanding of the multimodal cues used in the selected cartoons, to find out which elements (verbal or nonverbal) help them more in the understanding of the cartoonists' point of view and whether this has any relation with gender and age or not. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are applied to gather, analyse and interpret the data. The results of the qualitative analysis have revealed that humour can be produced not only by verbal or visual elements, but also by combination of both. Analysis on the quantitative level has revealed that most participants can observe the cartoonists' point of view easily and through pictorial elements more than the verbal ones. In addition, age and gender have little effects on understanding humour in political cartoons; as male and old participants can observe the intended meaning more easily than females and young participants.
 

الكلمات الرئيسية

الموضوعات الرئيسية