Humour in Macanese Creole literature as an identity creator and consolidator

Abstract

Macanese Creole survives in literary works of the late 19th and 20th centuries. This paper explores comic literature, which constitutes the bulk of the existing corpus in this language, and analyses how this genre relates to the creation and maintenance of a Macanese identity represented as distinct from surrounding historically and demographically significant identities. I resort to the incongruity theory and to some relevant knowledge resources (script opposition, situation, target, and language) of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo and Raskin, 1991; Attardo 2001; 2008) to analyse how comic literature in Macanese fabricates a fictionalised and performative memory connected to the way in which the Macanese wish to see themselves and be seen by others.