The interaction of cartoonist's gender and formal features of cartoons

Abstract

The present study investigates gender di¤erences in the use of formal features of cartoons, like the amount of text, the number of panels, or the application of color. For the analysis, 300 cartoons (150 each by female and male cartoonists) were selected randomly from the works of 1519 cartoonists. Twenty-one formal features were analyzed. On average, female cartoonists use more text, include text more frequently, and also draw more panels. These di¤erences were expected, because Di¤erential Psychology has shown for a long time in a variety of cultures that, on average, women tend to perform better in tasks testing verbal intelligence whereas men perform significantly better in tasks that require spatial intelligence. We also found a di¤erence in the type of joke: Women more frequently draw cartoons with incongruity-resolution humor, whereas men prefer to draw cartoons with nonsense humor. The results are discussed in relation to gender di¤erences in humor processing and gender di¤erences in general.

Cognitive humor processing: Different logical mechanisms in nonverbal cartoons—an fMRI study

“…Cartoons can be classified in relation to formal or structural aspects (i.e., drawing style, resolvability of the incongruity, proportion of visual and verbal elements, etc.). There is evidence from several behavioral studies that formal as well as structural elements of the stimuli influence humor perception and processing (e.g., Herzog & Larwin, 1988;Huber & Leder, 1997;Ruch & Hehl, 1998;Samson & Huber, 2007).…”

La representación de la mujer en la viñeta española: construcción y participación femenina

“…En relación al género dentro de la viñeta, en los últimos años han proliferado los espacios que utilizan dicha herramienta como forma de reivindicación y lucha por la igualdad, con independencia de que sea utilizada por un o una viñetista, por ejemplo: 1) libros como Funny Girls-Cartooning for Equality (1997) de Diane Atkinson, o Women Deliver, the World Receives (2013) de Liza Donnelly; 2) revistas especializadas como International Journal of Comic Art (2008); 3) congresos como A Cartoon colloquium (2013); o 4) exposiciones como Illustrators for Gender Equality (2007) (Rivas, 2015). De la misma forma, existen investigaciones centradas en estudiar las representaciones de género a través de las viñetas (Glascock y Preston-Schreck, 2004;Conners, 2010;Zurbriggen y Sherman, 2010;Agüero, 2013;Mararo y Mberia, 2014), las diferencias que existen entre los dibujos de mujeres y hombres viñetistas (Samson y Huber, 2007), y la escasez de mujeres reconocidas en este campo (Wong y Cuklanz, 2002).…”

Untitled

“…Although humour in political cartoons is not the cartoonist's main objective (Cagle and Fairrington 2007, vi), political cartoons can nevertheless be funny. Yet, there are few publications on humour in cartoons (Paolillo 1998;Samson and Huber 2007;Hempelmann and Samson 2008) and humour in political cartoons (Tsakona 2009), compared to numerous publications on humour in jokes. In her analysis of Greek political cartoons, Villy Tsakona applies the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991) and the two visual metaphors she encounters are subsumed under the Language knowledge resource of the theory together with parallel verbal metaphors in the same cartoons.…”