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

Abstract

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.