Abstract:
Humor is an essential component of human communication, and so it is also
significantly present in media that mirrors human society. Entertainment in media
provides the audience a gateway to leisure and relaxation from everyday stress.
Children's entertainment is more often filled with comic and humoristic content as it is
considered more suitable by the guardians as well (Turkmen, 2016). Moreover, children
use humor to form a relationship with others while it also shows their linguistic
competence (Semrud-Clikeman & Glass, 2010). Animation movies are also part of
entertainment media which mainly targets a younger audience. However, the
humoristic content in animation has been rarely analyzed. The present study explores
Pakistani animated movies to analyze the linguistic techniques which are used to create
humor by following Berger’s (2017) typology. Furthermore, the present study also
explores the occurrence and co-occurrence of various humor types in Pakistani
animated movies, Allahyar & the legend of Markhor (2018) and The Donkey King
(2018). A qualitative research design proposed by van der Wal, Piotrowski, et al.
(2020) is followed to analyze the data. The study’s findings show that most scenes used
language to generate humor. Aggressive, absurdity, and incongruity are the most
occurring humor types in movies while incongruity and absurdity share a positive
correlation. Furthermore, wordplay, ridicule, sarcasm, and insult are commonly used
linguistic techniques to generate humor.
