Abstract
This chapter addresses the way visual jokes communicate nonverbally and discursively, differing from their verbal counterparts by conveying their message without the use of speech acts, written or spoken. Further, as a visual rather than verbal mode of communication, the stereotypes and stigmas illustrated through stock figures and visual tropes don’t tell us how our referent looks but what our referent is like.
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Notes
- 1.
“A depiction, then, is a representation whose function is to serve as a prop in reasonably rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe” (Walton 296).
- 2.
As we saw in the earlier section, visual depictions of the cartoon variety, though entirely void of text, can clearly convey a message to their viewer. And here is where we run into some tension. Whether a visual depiction counts as a kind of discursive, nonverbal message is one thing. Whether it counts as a joke may be another matter entirely.
- 3.
“A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts” (Saussure, cited in Hawkes 1977: 123).
- 4.
As meaning makers, both language and social systems provide meanings to representations. The meaning provided by these factors raises the hermeneutical challenge of interpreting received interpretations.
- 5.
This idea may sound quite similar to the familiar jingle “existence precedes essence” associated with Jean Paul-Sartre’s existentialist theory of meaning, where one’s meaning is at least partly comprised of how one is “seen” when one is “being seen.” “What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing” (Sartre et al. 1945: cf. Yale 2007).
- 6.
“The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a ‘copy’ of reality” (Gombrich 1960: 87).
- 7.
“[...] even the shape of the new vessel will somehow belong to the same family of forms as those the craftsman has seen, [given] that his representation of ‘everything that exists in nature’ will still be linked with those representations that were handed on to him by his teachers” (Gombrich 25).
- 8.
Norms of cartooning, for example, include the norm that blood is not to be shed in cartoons of the Sunday comic strip variety, modes of depicted subject expression, including fumetti of speech and thought, who, by their frame style, separate from contents, convey indicators of the kind of emotion they’re meant to convey, as well as modes of action, including sphericasia, plewds, maladicta, and symbolia (Walker 1980 and 2000). Regarding norms of the particular style of depiction within the cartoon style that can be used to facilitate and convey contents, styles may include but are not limited to warping of the features in any number of the typical technical styles of cartoon depiction, including the use of maladictia, muscloma, tagatons, blurgits, sphericasia, agitrons, briffits, hites, and emanata that depict the body, cognitive capacity, character trope, and mode of expression in an exaggerated form, respectively.
- 9.
For example, on popular Korean shows, sometimes an evil program editor on a Korean show imposes a dog barking over someone’s testimony. If you’re an American, you likely won’t understand what the point of this is, or why the audience around you laughs in response. If you’re familiar with the Korean language, however, you know that the term “dog sound” (개소리, or gaesori) is a kind of swear word used to refer to lying, and in particular to bullshitting, or otherwise deceiving. So, when someone has a dog bark superimposed on their testimony, the editor is calling it “dog sound” or lie, but in such a way that we’re meant to take their attempt to deceive their listeners as not merely shameful but laughable. My Korean husband finds this funny, but when I saw it at first, it carried no meaning to me, as I had no familiarity with this term or its audiovisual counterpart.
Works Cited
Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. London: Bloomsbury.
Gombrich, E.H. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon.
Hawkes, Terence. 1977. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge.
McCloud, S. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, et al. 1945. Existentialism Is a Humanism (L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme); Including, a Commentary on The Stranger (Explication De L’Étranger). 2007. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smith, Greg M. 2001. Cinema Journal 41 (1): 129–130.
Walker, Mort. 1980 & 2000. The Lexicon of Comicana. Lincoln. Museum of Cartoon Art.
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Gregg, M. (2023). The Unique Unspoken Discourse of Visual Jokes. In: The Untold Help of Harmful Visual Jokes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39981-7_2
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