Making Children Laugh: Exploring Linguistic Techniques and Types of Humor in Pakistani Animated Films

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.