Signals of humor

Pragmeme of Political Humour in Selected Nigerian Political Cartoons

“…With the aid of irony, labels, and symbols, this cartoon is advertently encrypted with humourous intent, of which it could be avowed that readers or viewers would be able to decrypt by virtue of shared background knowledge. This is the humour that is affirmed to have evolved as a means of honestly signalling compatibility within local groups (in this case, the cartoonists and mostly Nigerian readers) by relying on the detection of encrypted information, their cognition of which is then signalled via honest laughter (Flamson & Bryant, 2013). However, in addition to the honest laughter, there is the certainty that the readership barely understood the hidden message, hence the need to resort to the framework of pragmeme.…”

“…The heart of Flamson and Barrett's theory of encryption-decryption stands in the submission that intentionally produced humour honestly signals the fact that speaker and audience share information, enabling the assessment of relative similarity and social assortment for compatibility over time (Flamson & Bryant, 2013). The impression given by this humour theory is that, essentially, humorous productions come with layers of inference of a speaker's meaning, the majority of which rely on access to implied information on the part of the conveyer of humour and the audience.…”

“…The encryption model, thus, emanates from the notion that humour is an encoded form of communicative act, a message-based mechanism, whose inherent meaning could only be decrypted if its target audience has possession of a "key", that is, the common knowledge, attitudes, and preferences required to derive the implied messages contained in the piece. The degree to which the encrypted message seems non-random to key-holders strengthens the 'manifestness' of the speaker's possession of the key (Flamson & Bryant, 2013). This encrypted aspect of humour, in the words of Flamson and Barret (2008:262), "explains both a pervasive proximate aspect of humour (the non-random fit between the explicit information in jokes and the implicit background knowledge they refer to) and its ultimate function as a social assortment device", that is, its potency for engendering affiliations with compatible local peers.…”

“…However, the more processing efforts involved in deriving its cognitive effects, the less relevant it is. A humorous text is especially relevant to any audience by virtue of its modest contextual effects on their environment and it is also relevant to that subset of audience members whose cognitive environments contain the key (Flamson & Bryant, 2013).…”

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2013

“…157 "Encryption" turns out to mean allusion to a set of plausible inferences, and the authors propose that an encryption theory of humor "is a synthesis of many disparate approaches to humor and laughter." 158 Whether or not a reader accepts this taxonomy as some kind of breakthrough, it is heartening to see efforts of this sort, from within humor research, to move out of this winter of semantic analysis. In "Comic Nescience: An Experimental View of Humour and a Case for the Cultural Negotiation Function of Humour," Dalbir Sehmby offers another taxonomy in hopes of a similar escape.…”