MULTIMODAL HUMOR IN PAKISTANI EDITORIAL CARTOONS: A GTVH-BASED ANALYSIS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22065698Keywords:
Corpus-Based Humor Research, Editorial Cartoons, General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), Knowledge Resources, Pakistani Media, Political HumorAbstract
Applications of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) beyond verbal-joke corpora and Western contexts remain limited and are predominantly qualitative. To fill this research gap, the present study explores the construction of humor in Pakistani editorial cartoons by employing the complete six-Knowledge-Resource (KR) architecture of the GTVH that includes Script Opposition, Logical Mechanism, Situation, Target, Narrative Strategy and Language. A stratified random sample of 500 editorial cartoons published between May 2023 and April 2024 was selected from five Pakistani Urdu- and English-language newspapers. All six KRs were systematically coded for each cartoon. The analysis reveals that humor is based primarily on Normal/Abnormal Script Opposition (85.2%), resolved mainly by Exaggeration and Juxtaposition (32.2% combined), situated in the context of the Political, Economic and Electoral macro-scripts (46.2%), aimed mostly at collective political actors (31.6%), presented with monologic caption/headline structures as Narrative Strategy (51.4%) and most often realized in the referential form of humor (73.4%). Together these distributions show an integrated profile of genre-level humor which is cognitively accessible, politically focused, visually predominant, actor-oriented, and normatively structured, and not simply a set of six independent tendencies. The study is the first to use the entire GTVH architecture to a full-scale corpus of multi-modal political cartoons from a non-Western context, which sets a baseline for future research on the use of the theory for genre-specific and culture-specific applications.
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