CROSS-MODAL SCRIPT OPPOSITION IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF MULTIMODAL HUMOR IN PAKISTANI EDITORIAL CARTOONS

Abstract

Script Opposition is the fundamental mechanism of humor; however, its formulation has been studied mainly in verbal texts, and its application to multimodal humor remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating the realization of Script Opposition in Pakistani editorial cartoons. To examine its multimodal realization, a corpus of 500 editorial cartoons was selected through stratified random sampling from five Pakistani newspapers—Dawn, The Express Tribune, The Nation, Daily Times, and Daily Jang—published over a one-year period from May 2023 to April 2024. The data were first classified using Samson and Huber's (2007) multimodality typology, which was then integrated with Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) framework for the analysis of multimodal Script Opposition. The results indicated that 92.2% of the cartoons in the corpus were multimodal, and 89.8% of this exhibited interactive multimodality, requiring both verbal and visual channels to produce humor. Qualitative analysis further illustrated that visual and verbal scripts oppose and interact to generate humorous meaning. This cross-modal organization challenges the largely monomodal assumptions underlying verbal humor theory. The study confirms that cartoons, as a humorous newspaper text structure, are predominantly realized cross-modally through Script Opposition, and extends the Script Opposition Knowledge Resource of the GTVH to incorporate the cross-modal distribution of scripts, thereby advancing the theoretical framework of multimodal satirical discourse.