Cringe humor in Egyptian TokTok: multimodal critical discourse analysis of selected comic strips

Abstract

Abstract After the January 2011 revolution, Egyptian artists had the opportunity to express their ideas more openly. One of the major productions that started in 2011 in Egypt was TokTok, a comic magazine for adults. During the period of 2011–2015, TokTok issued fifteen issues that incorporated a collection of comics and comic strips created by different Egyptian artists. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether cringe humor has been an integral part of the drawings and stories presented in TokTok and how this type of humor reflected the socio-cultural and political scene in Egypt during that period. For this paper, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge) model of multimodal analysis was applied to selected comics from the fifteen issues of TokTok to investigate possible elements of cringe humor as depicted in this Egyptian graphic magazine. Major results show that elements of cringe humor are not evident in all analyzed comics.