Decoding monomodal and multimodal incongruitya genre-specific analysis of humor in contemporary spanish political cartoons

Resumen

The interpretation of humorous discourse is a complex process that requires different types of competences. Investigations on cartoon humor have generally addressed the process of incongruity resolution by applying linguistic theories or by focusing on extratextual factors, disregarding their visual or verbo-pictorial nature, and leaving monomodal cartoons unexamined. What has been commonly overlooked is the fact that the incongruous blend in cartoons is produced by two input spaces that are constructed by pictorial or multimodal metaphors. To find the cues that lead to the process of unpacking the blend, readers must turn to their linguistic knowledge, but also to their ability to read the visual grammar of cartoons. This dissertation revisits previous theories that study the mechanisms that interplay in readers’ decoding of incongruous blends to propose a genre-specific model of analysis that takes into account all the semiotic codes that comprise multimodal as well as monomodal cartoons. In addition, the dissertation includes a pedagogical intervention study that corroborates the validity of the proposed hypotheses.