Cartoons in Romanian humorous news (original) (raw)

Pictorial-verbal interplay in Romanian cartoons

Romanian Humour, 2020

This chapter tackles the interplay between verbal and nonverbal humour in a number of cartoons collected from the Romanian humorous press in the late nineteenthearly twen tieth century. Cartoons could be considered multimodal puzzles accessible to the readers (Harvey 2009: 29). I shall focus on two types of cartoons: on the one hand, cartoons in which the graphic part provides information that is not available in the verbal part (both components equally contribute to the humorous effect), and on the other hand, cartoons in which the graphic part is essential in producing humour, while the verbal component is accessory. As regards the topic of the selected cartoons, I shall analyse gag and ed itorial cartoons, two types that are underresearched, in my opinion, if compared with political cartoons. The analysis attempts to highlight the pragmarhetorical mechanisms of triggering humour. These mechanisms are influenced by the Romanian cultural mod els. As shown by Kronenfeld (2008), cultural models are part of the cultural cognitive structures that allow individuals to act or interpret the actions of others. Cartoons allow access to the cultural model of a (imposed or unrestricted) group and emphasise a type of behaviour that needs sanctioning.

he Discourse on Humour in the Romanian Press between 1948-1965

Slovo

Once the official proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic takes place, on the 30 th of December 1947, the process of imposing new cultural values on society gradually permeates all areas of Romanian social life. Humour also becomes part of this process of transforming the social and cultural life, often regarded as a powerful weapon with which to attack 'old' bourgeois mentalities. According to Hans Speier, the official type of humour promoted by an authoritarian regime is political humour, which contributes to maintain the existent social order, or plays its part in changing it-all depending on those holding the reins over massmedia. 1 Taking the Soviet Union as a model, the Romanian new regime imposes an official kind of humour, created through mass-media: the press, the radio, literature, cinematography, and television. This paper analyses the Romanian discourse on humour, reflected in the press,

Cartoons in Spanish Press: a pragmatic approach

Article published in: Irony and Humor: From pragmatics to discourse. Edited by L. Ruiz Gurillo and M. B. Alvarado. [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 231] 2013. pp. 141–158 This chapter has as its main aim to reflect on humorous communication taking as a reference the graphic jokes (or cartoons) which appear in the press. Our reflection will start with an attempt to define what graphic jokes are as a particular genre within the so-called ‘humorous genres.’ This definition has a twofold objective: the first one is to delimit the study object for this paper; the second one, to check the way in which the characteristics of this genre or its components may influence our description of humorous communication. In this respect, the description of humor (and that of other related phenomena: irony, sarcasm and lie) in cartoons will incorporate a specific component, the one deriving from what is inherent to cartoons; and another general one which is common to any humorous communicative situation. There will obviously be communicating vessels between both. Secondly, we plan to describe the framework from which pragmatic analysis is going to be carried out. It is worth highlighting beforehand that our research will assume ideas and proposals of Grice (1975), Levinson (2000), Raskin (1985) and Attardo (1994, 1997, 2001, 2006), or Schank and Abelson (1977). The last section focuses on explaining how this all materializes in the specific analysis of cartoons. 300 graphic jokes which appeared in the Spanish press between 2007 and 2012 served as the starting point for our work. Some of these cartoons will help illustrate the phenomena analyzed here.

A semiotic study of political cartoon strips in The Nation National Daily

AFRREV LALIGENS: An International Journal of Language, Literature and Gender Studies, 2018

Communication is a very important means of exchanging ideas and the ability to communicate effectively is necessary to carry out the thoughts and visions of every individual, group or nation. Consequentially, communicators especially cartoonists have made vigorous efforts to portray the society by familiarizing people with ongoing events in the societies through cartoons. This paper explores the sign of cartoon strips and examines how they are used in communicating message(s). Using a semiotic frame work, it presents a method of interpreting and gaining meaning into cartoons. The purpose of this paper is to help people who have great interest in cartoons to better understand cartoons and also answer questions raised in the paper which include; Are cartoons a true representation of current political parties, personalities and situations?, Do cartoon strips like other signs have both denotative and connotative meanings?, Do cartoon have the potentials for more than one interpretation/meaning?, can cartoons be understood better using the semiotic frame work?, The paper also presents the semiotic codes used in cartooning. Finally, the paper advances the analysis of verbal and non-verbal codes like cartoons as important medium of communication.

Cognition and culture in political cartoons

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2008

The creation and interpretation of humor in cartoons draws on various cognitive mechanisms, such as conceptual metaphor and metonymy, conceptual integration or blending, and cognitive and cultural models. The role that these mechanisms play in the humor process has been explored in relatively recent studies (Coulson Brône, Feyaerts & Veale 2006). The present paper examines humor in political cartoons in relation to the Referendum on the European Constitution, held in France on May 29, 2005, and the various perceptions and representations of the results in the English and Spanish press. The paper aims to: (a) explore some of the cognitive mechanisms involved in the construction of meaning, in particular metaphoric and metonymic reasoning and conceptual blending; and (b) reveal some of the common or contrasting features of cultural models in political cartoons in English and Spanish, and the role that these cartoons play in reinforcing or challenging social, cultural and political practices. The analysis reveals the ways in which humor is used as a form of criticism against the dominant ideology of French political elite, as well as an attack, especially in the Spanish press, against the government.

A multimodal analysis of conventional humorous structures on sensitive topics within rural communities in Romania

The European Journal of Humour Research, 2017

When it comes to humour, performing humorous structures means not only producing amusement, but also implies the ability of perceiving the comical, ludicrous or absurd in human life. In this paper, I consider humour as a way in which people in the rural community express themselves freely, without boundaries or constraints. Therefore, the interest of the present article is to identify and analyse sensitive humorous topics in Romanian rural communities. In conducting the study, the following steps were taken: I videotaped people from the Upper Valley of the river Mureș (selected with sociolinguistic criteria such as gender, age, occupation), I transcribed the audio-video records and I divided the data into thematic categories: jokes, traditional shouts and funeral songs or dirges with humorous structures. Starting from these methodological steps, I attempt to perform a multimodal analysis, which consists of analysing both the text and the audio-video record. In the first part of my r...

Political cartoons on Greek debt crisis: a cognitive and pragmatic approach

LinRed, 2019

The aim of this paper is to analyse the artist-reader communication in political cartoons. We will define cartoons as a multimodal genre in which meaning is derived from a conceptual integration of image and text. We will present the blending theory as a useful model to illustrate how the reader reaches a new humorous reality by the connection of different mental inputs. We will describe cooperation within the cartoon as a reflection of contextualisation cues, i.e., those elements that the artist uses to create the cartoon and to help the reader interpret his/her work correctly. Finally, we will identify two different components within the political cartoons message: a) the jest and b) the sting (the critique). These two components and their corresponding pragmatic processes (pragmatic presuppositions and implicatures) interact with the different levels of interpretation and understanding of a cartoon.

Language and image interaction in cartoons: Towards a multimodal theory of humor

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

In cartoons, meaning and humor are produced either via two semiotic modes, the verbal and the visual, or solely via the visual mode. Due to their condensed form and to the interaction between language and image, cartoons are often considered to be a direct and easy to process means of communicating a message. The present study aims at showing that cartoon humor is not always easy to grasp fully, therefore the reader should pay attention to all the verbal and visual details of each cartoon. For this purpose, a General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) framework of analysis is adopted, while cognitive and semiotic approaches are complementary and relevant in this respect. Special attention is paid to exaggeration, contradiction, and metaphor as humorous mechanisms and to the hyperdetermination of humor, which seems to result from the interaction of verbal and visual elements and from the use of visual metaphor. By bringing to the surface some of the common humorous mechanisms in both the verbal and the visual mode, the present analysis aims at taking the GTVH a step further towards the unification of linguistic and semiotic approaches to humor. #

Understanding the world by means of Cartoons in modern media space

Organizational Psycholinguistics (ОРГАНИЗАЦИОННАЯ ПСИХОЛИНГВИСТИКА), 2022

The topic of this study is inspired by my own personal skill in drawing cartoons, my professional experience as a cartoonist and journalist, and a profound long-term interest in exploring the communication capabilities of cartooning. In a nutshell, this article asserts how cartoons, as a Western branch of fine art, from the stage of artistic endeavor evolved to achieve a deeper visual language to the stage of deployment of cartoon capabilities with the goal of "public awareness" and then were utilized as a means of visual protest during the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century. From the Renaissance to the invention of the printing press, this evolution entered a new phase, focusing on the characteristics of political action. Stemming from the point that the main place and prosperous point of cartoons is in the press, the roles and functions of editorial cartoons have been analyzed. The objective is to come up with an appropriate response to the topic of why cartoons are such excellent communication vehicles. This paper tries to explain how cartoonists, as excellent communicators, continually use written and visual means among the four basic modes of communication: verbal, nonverbal, written, and visual. Following that, it will be explained how cartoons will work very efficiently when you need to convey complicated and sensitive messages or need the participation of people. According to the findings of this study, cartoons are the outcome of human beings' careful observation, which broadens our awareness of current human beings' predicament in the new media landscape.