Comic Elements Research Articles

Features of Modern Comic Advertising

The purpose of this article is to analyze the texts of modern advertising with comic elements. Modern advertising is increasingly using various pragmatic strategies aimed at evoking emotions in the addressee. One of the effective ways to achieve this goal is to use humor and create a comic effect. Humor helps to attract the audience's attention and remember the advertising message. Advertising texts often use a variety of linguistic techniques and play with linguistic devices to achieve their goals. Speech polysemy of linguistic means, along with homonymy, functional syncretism, play with words, comic images and situations most often become the cause of the comic. In the analysis of advertising texts, the continuous sampling method was used. Its use helped to select more than 50 advertising texts with comic overtones. Quantitative analysis was used to quantify advertisements with comic elements and to survey men and women to determine the impact of such advertisements on their daily lives. During the research, it was revealed that advertising with comic elements is capable of more fully, informatively and clearly conveying information, emotions and values through a combination of verbal and non-verbal elements, taking into account the preferences and expectations of the target audience. The article can be used as an application for students of advertising science, some aspects of modern journalism and comic literature.

Understanding humour as the catalyst to social reform: A study of Mahesh Dattani’s Where There Is a Will (1988)

Mahesh Dattani (b. 1958) is a reformist playwright of modern India whose works have been interpreted as texts of social critique. Academics such as Erin B. Mee and Asha Kuthari Chowdhari have attributed his works to the ‘invisible issues’ permeating India’s urban middle classes. They have highlighted how Dattani portrays topics such as gender inequality, homosexuality and communal violence to appeal to the public in pursuit of social reform. This article proposes that humour, in addition to these themes, is an equally essential aspect of Dattani’s reformist visions. It argues that Dattani’s humour resonates with what J. L. Styan calls the ‘dark comedy’. It explores the use of humour in Dattani’s play, Where There Is a Will (1988), through Henri Bergson’s concepts of comical inversion, rigidity and symmetrical repetition, to examine the comical elements of the events, dialogue and characters. This approach assists Dattani in posing reformative queries and, according to Styan, eliciting responses from the readers/audience.

Dark Humour in Moving Frames: A Discourse Analysis of Bollywood Black Comedies

ABSTRACT The present study delves into the portrayal of dark humour in the Hindi films produced in Mumbai, popularly known as Bollywood films. The dark humour films of Bollywood mainly focus on prevalent social issues such as violence in the underworld, corruption, prostitution, and persistent poverty in India, while socially conscious Bollywood films have often sentimentalised these issues by depicting impoverished individuals as virtuous and hardworking. This study investigates the emerging trend of intermingling serious and comic elements in an attempt to create a more impactful narrative. While employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a tool to dissect the dialogues and storylines and aiming to identify instances of humour, irony, satire, and social critique, the current study attempts to analyse two Bollywood films—Dev D (2009) and Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017). The findings highlight how these films utilise dark humour to unveil the double standards and hypocrisy prevalent in Indian society. By challenging established norms, the identity constructed through dark humour in these films seeks to provoke critical reflection and initiate social change. Through this examination, Bollywood’s evolving approach to addressing social issues becomes evident, providing insights into the power of dark humour in shaping the prevailing social context.

Swift's Subversive Satire: Unveiling Society's Foibles in Gulliver's Travels

This study aimed to investigate the effects of a specific intervention on a particular outcome. Its primary objective is to examine a given intervention's impacts on a well-defined group. The analysis explores the employment of Satire by Jonathan Swift in his renowned literary masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels. Satire is an academic technique, authors employ to expose and criticize the illogical and immoral aspects of an individual or a society, employing comic elements, irony, exaggeration, or scorn. Gulliver's Travels effectively utilizes a range of literary tropes, such as Satire, skillfully conveyed through narration, setting, character development, and plot advancement. Jonathan Swift used many academic strategies in his satirical novel to create a backdrop combining utopia and dystopia elements. Additionally, he exploits certain character archetypes, such as a miser and tyrant figure, a moral touchstone, and a repulsive character, to effectively portray the desired character as typical. The deliberate employment of a first-person narrator is evident in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver's Travels is a notable piece of literature wherein Jonathan Swift skillfully uses the method of Satire to aptly criticize the prevailing concerns of corruption, vices, and societal follies. However, Swift's scholarly endeavors encompass analyzing diverse aspects of society to employ Satire to critique the political system and sociological framework. The author's work aims to clarify the adverse outcomes that arise from uncontrolled greed and despair, ultimately leading to the deterioration and demise of society.

“Taking Comedy Seriously”: Humour in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

Mediatization of corruption cases in Indonesia through comics journalism in Tempo magazine

Corruption in Indonesia is a never-ending and pervasive issue, as the numerous cases prove. Many public officials, businesspeople and private parties have been involved and found guilty in corruption trials. The verdict of the judges’ panel against the accused of corruption cases in Indonesia did not dampen the enthusiasm of several corruption perpetrators who were incarcerated at Sukamiskin Prison in Bandung. This research aims to examine the construction of news in the comics journalism format in Tempo magazine, specifically focusing on how corrupt behaviour in the form of bribery committed by criminals in Sukamiskin Prison is portrayed. This analysis is motivated by the mediatization theory, which is further supported by the mediatization of journalism. This research uses a semiotic-material approach that analyses Tempo comics journalism texts with a focus on elements of symbolism, timing and frames. The research found that Tempo mediated the news about bribery by grafters in Sukamiskin Prison through elements of comics based on journalistic practices. The mediation effort consists of two distinct stages: firstly, journalists on the field engage in the work and, secondly, the composer of the comic constructs the mediation.

Comic Elements as a System of Queer Expression: A Close Analysis of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer: A Memoir

The paper analyses the relationship between queer and comics, with a particular emphasis on Maia Kobabe's graphic memoir Gender Queer: A Memoir. It explores the narrative significance of comics and the convergence of queerness within the medium, framed within the theoretical frameworks of Scott McCloud, Richard Walsh, Ramzi Fawaz, and Darieck Scott. The primary objective of the study is to demonstrate how words and images interact to communicate Maia's gender and sexual identities in a way that defies accepted cultural norms. It analyses and exhibits the ability of the visual narrative to convey nuanced facets of queer identity, ranging from representations of physical discomfort during medical exams to the presentation of romantic fantasies defying binary gender norms. The paper concludes that Maia employs an effective tool to convey the subtleties of eir queer identity through the symbiotic relationship between words and pictures, based on a careful analysis of eir narrative. Beyond the confines of conventional language, a more comprehensive expression of gender and sexuality is made possible by the interaction of words and images.

Дихотомии анализа комического текста

The article deals with the poetics of the comic, the main focus is on the categories of analysis of individual comic segments. The material for the study was the prose of Nikolai Gogol. According to scientific literature, a comic work can be described not only as an aesthetic phenomenon but also as a cognitive construction and a special symbolic practice, which makes it possible to differentiate comic elements according to various criteria. A close reading of a comic fragment shows that a relatively small amount of text can contain many comic components, between which structural, content, and pragmatic differences can be detected. The comic text is considered through the prism of a set of dichotomies: active laughter – reduced laughter, satire – humor, comic deviation – nonsense, a simple comic element – a complex comic element. As shows an analysis of examples of reduced laughter (the term coined by M. M. Bakhtin), reduction of the comic is often associated with the loss (or incomplete realization) in the segment of special interdiscursivity. Grasping the dichotomy of satire and humor requires taking into account the diversity of intentions realized in satire: it can not only ridicule anomalous objects but also destroy the norm itself. Among the anomalies underlying the comic game, it is possible to distinguish deviations (shifts from the norm) and nonsense. A comic text based on nonsense requires special interpretive scenarios (scripts), in particular, it is proposed to distinguish between nonsense as such and absurdity. Distinguishing comic routines that are complex (in terms of their structure of expression) significantly complicates the issue of quantitative analysis of the comic: the volume of comic segments and the volume of comic effects are not fundamentally equivalent.

소중애 동화의 희극성 - 인물과 구조를 중심으로 -

소중애 동화의 희극성 - 인물과 구조를 중심으로 -

Rethinking political discourse in an ‘unhinged’ age

ABSTRACT Where offered at all, current explanations of escalating political antagonism between right-wing extremists and progressives often rely on the idea that conflicting group opinions and beliefs have arisen from causes such as modernization, globalization and secularization. 1 I claim that this reading masks a more fundamental split in the way people relate to the Real. This more radical split can be referred to as ‘difference’ and while emanating from a theory of ‘sexual difference’, is more generalizable into an understanding of the way people think and engage in collective trans-subjective 2 behaviour. Such an understanding begins to shed light on the difficulties progressives have in defending against successful right-wing extremist incursions, rapidly increasing political polarization and discourse seemingly beyond the possibility of deliberation. I engage with a number of critical scholars, particularly through the work of Alenka Zupančič, on the ontological ‘messiness’ of sex (particularly its comical elements) and apply it more generally to politics. This is used to suggest explanations of what has happened and the value of new ways of thinking and speaking which, while encompassing the impossibility of ever resolving what is a logical impasse and the inherent contingency of politics, allow us to progress beyond antagonism.

The Transgressive Bodies of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens Line

This article explores the strategies employed by Dark Horse Comics to develop the Xenomorph creature and its associated universe across the publisher's Aliens line of titles. Through analysis of three Aliens miniseries’ story arcs that are representative of the line's narrative and structural innovation, my contribution explores how this corpus transgresses the parameters of the movie franchise's Science Fiction and action-horror genres in the following three ways. Firstly, I investigate the Aliens comics’ introduction of dreams and psychological trauma associated with the literary Gothic past in Aliens: Sacrifice (March–June 1993). Secondly, in keeping with the Gothic's comic turn, I examine the humorous, parodic, and self-referential elements of comics in Aliens: Stronghold (May–September 1994). Thirdly, I explore Dark Horse Comics’ critical understanding of negative nostalgia in preserving and transgressing the narrative structure and aesthetics of Alien (1979) in Aliens: Dead Orbit (April–December 2017). Ultimately, this article considers these three themes as examples of the paradoxically transgressive and restorative elements of Gothic that are apparent throughout Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens line. It argues that the ways in which the Aliens line innovatively reworks these aesthetic and narrative features of the film franchise's visual and thematic origins provide a critical understanding of the productive interactions between comics and literary Gothic traditions.

JOKER MEMES AS A FORM OF EXPRESSING INNER THOUGHTS: A CHARACTER ANALYSIS OF JOKER WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY

The term ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ was coined by the French theatre director, Antonin Artaud (1986-1948), in 1932, and it was a widely debated concept in that decade. The ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ is more concerned with the audience's sense experience than with dialogue and content. The term the theatre of cruelty offers a ground-breaking concept that aims to cultivate profound and immersive theatrical barriers between performers and audience members. Through its deliberate efforts to elicit intense emotional responses and challenge established theatrical conventions, it captivates by providing a transformative and boundary-breaking experience. The presence of the idea of the theatre of cruelty can be seen in films such as ‘The Joker’ and ‘Batman’. According to various studies, the film character Joker is influencing real-world violence. Traditionally, the role of the Joker, a clown character in the circus, is to create a comic sense among the audience. The Joker usually creates false himself and his pain and sadness within himself and expresses happiness outside to make the audience happy or create relief. In due course, it turned into a creepy clown, a clown carrying violence. Through the films ‘The Joker’ and ‘Batman’, the Joker's character gradually evolved into a celebrity anarchist. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people throughout the world made memes of the Joker character with violent elements to express their feelings and to anticipate attention and care. The Joker has become a multilayered character. People started to enjoy the dark characteristics of the Joker character in the films more than the comic elements of the Joker character. With the help of secondary sources and data collected through social media, newspapers, and articles, the study attempts to understand memes as a form of expressing inner thoughts concerning the theatre of cruelty.

Comedy in Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic

This essay examines Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic, a 2021 translation of Euripides illustrated by Rosanna Bruno. Carson’s subtitle, through the intersection of classical and modern senses of “the comic” as a genre, demands that the reader ask of her book: What is the place of comedy in a comic about one of the bleakest plays in the Western canon? The comic elements of The Trojan Women reframe Euripides’ narrative and underscore, in a bitter irony, the disastrous impact on the Greeks of the reconciliation of the gods Athena and Poseidon.

Klasyczno-nieklasyczny dramat Kaspra Brüloviusa o Juliuszu Cezarze

The article deals with the structure of the Latin tragedy Julius Caesar by Caspar Brülovius, a Pomeranian playwright associated with the Academy in Strasbourg. The text was published in 1616, has as many as 2580 verses and shows historical events that took place over the years: from 46 B.C., when Caesar triumphed, to 30 B.C., when the naval battle of Actium ended. One can get the impression that Brülovius carefully planned the original construction of his work: Acts II and III constitute the actual tragedy about Caesar, probably the closest to ancient plays, with a homogeneous, compact action and one main character. This part of the drama could exist on its own (without the other acts). Act I presents Caesar’s achievements (the conquest of Gaul) and is primarily aimed at educating Strasbourg students. The remaining acts (IV, V) not only pursue didactic goals, but also satisfy the tastes of the audience of the time, who probably liked the strings of death and horrors shown directly on the stage and the interweaving of comic elements with real tragedy. As a whole, Brülovius’ work is a non-classical drama, but Acts II and III, considered as a separate whole, constitute a classical drama.

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APOLLON GRIGORIEV IN STUDIES OF V.N. TURBIN’ SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS

The documents from Anna I. Zhuravleva’s personal archive allow us to trace the genesis of Ap. Grigoriev’ critical legacy interpretations, which originated in the student paper that Zhuravleva prepared together with E. Zhukovskaya at V.N. Turbin’s seminar “Lermontov in critique (1860s)” — for the 2nd Lermontov Student Conference which was held at Leningrad State University in May 1958. Th e paper is placed in the context of publications and research of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which tended to show the return of Grigoriev, who for ideological reasons had been virtually erased from Russian cultural history during the preceding period. Th e paper (based in part on Grigoriev’s District Epistle…, then unpublished, which had recently been found in the Mikhail Pogodin Collection in the Lenin State Library by V.Ja. Lakshin, a postgraduate student of the Philological Faculty of Moscow University) discusses Grigoriev’s own classification of literature into a serious and useful literature committed to the people, and literature of imitation. Th e reactions on this paper, as refl ected in the conference’ transcript, provide an opportunity to assess the extent and nature of interest in certain aspects of Grigoriev’s work (above all the tendency of the academic audience to “rehabilitate” Romanticism). Th e themes, approaches and even, in spite of the young age of the authors, some formulations that are important for A.I. Zhuravleva’s later studies (the so called narodnost’ in literature, the value of romanticism, the comic element) emerge in the paper. However, she would later write about Apollon Grigoriev as a critic, mainly in connection not with Lermontov, but with A.N. Ostrovskij.

5.18 소재 연극에 나타난 희극성의 양상과 그 의미

Plays to remember and recreate the May 18 Democratic Uprising continued to be made. Among them, Yoon Jung-hwan's The Champon and Ko Sun-woong's The Blue days were popularly successful, utilizing comedic elements, unlike the existing plays based on May 18. The Champon sharply satirizes the reality of the time through the ignorance of the character and the coincidence of the incident, but induces laughter and empathy from the audience. On the other hand, in the case of The Blue Days, the original work with a strong melodramatic character is newly interpreted in the production process and is comicly transformed. Comic elements seen in the character's lines and acting block the audience from fully immersed in the situation in the play. Through this, the meaning of the case was made to be considered. These two works are of value and significance in that they summon the past to the living present and show new possibilities to continuously remember and commemorate May 18.

Ирония и юмор в публицистике как когнитивная стратегия (медийно-культурологические аспекты)

Irony as a narrative-cognitive strategy, in comparison with social and ethical analytics in the media or with the entertaining pathos of laughter in journalism, rarely attracted the attention of researchers, although its heuristic potential is self-evident and is reflected in the works of many researchers. The study and explication of the interaction and contradictions of “cognition” and “hedonism” is topical. The purpose of the study: to show, using examples of predominantly English-language texts, the specificity of ironic overtones that create additional narrative expression related to the cognitive strategies of the authors, that is, to the setting for expanding the horizons of knowledge in the context of the modern development of the theory of mass media, communication and literary criticism. Methods of the study: cognitive-contextual, combined with historical and cultural analysis of ironic discourses. The nature of the information and cultural potential of ironic discourses is characterized, taking into account the “postmodern sensitivity”. The pragmatic expediency of the interaction of irony and analytics in the construction of the epistemological paradigm of journalistic narratives is substantiated. Conclusions are drawn about the cognitive-heuristic significance of comic elements in journalistic texts, about the benefits of intrusion of hedonistic values into serious media discourses, about the conflict of interests of “humorists” and “cognitivists” in media narratives and in the science of mass communications.

BLOOD ON HIS WORDS, BARLEY ON HIS MIND. TRUE NAMES IN CAESAR'S SPEECH FOR THE LEGENDARY ‘BARLEY-MUNCHER’ (BGALL.7.77)

AbstractCritognatus’ speech has long been recognized as heavily by Caesar's hand, although few have questioned whether any speech was delivered by the Arvernian noble at all; and it has long puzzled readers with its contradictory manner and fierce criticism of Rome. But the etymologizing wordplay across several languages demonstrated below (along with other distinctly comical elements) renders it more than likely that both the speech and the speaker are products of the author's imagination. In its Nabokovian mode, it offers a glimpse of Caesar the linguist and introduces a playfulness into the dire situation before Alesia that suggests that the ‘Barley-Muncher’ and his speech should be reconsidered in a different, more humorous light.

The actual discourse of boychukizm: illustration cycle by B. Blank and M. Fradkin 1935

The article is devoted of detailed of analysis of the illustrative cycle of the two Ukrainian artists, followers of the Boychuk school — Ber Blank (1897–1957) and Moses Fradkin (1904–1974) to the famous novel «The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak» (1867) by Belgian novelist Charles De Coster. Their graphic interpretation is both reflection of the totalitarian contradictions of their era and challenge to its conventions. Their actual discourse is not devoid of doom: they are contemporaries of Stalinist dictatorship, they are also its victims. But they are trying metaphorically show horror of their time, embodied, for example, in the torture of the Inquisition, the persecution of dissidents. Subsequent illustrators of that novel were not so pessimistic (especially, Evgeniy Kibrik, in the future — the brilliant illustrator of Nikolay Gogol and Romain Rolland), but they paid more attention to Thyl Ulenspiegel, informal Flanders rebel leader. However, illustrative cycle of Ber Blank and Moses Fradkin is rather a novel without a hero. They prefer to depicts crowds of people engulfed in suffering (as it was accepted at Boychuk’s school). There is little resistance to the invaders, which feels doomed in 1930s. But much attention is paid to the denunciation to the representatives of the clergy (they were especially persecuted by Soviet power). It is interesting that the artists also ignored comic element of Coster’s novel, which was discovered by artists of the post-war era based on the theory of laughed culture of Mikhail Bakhtin. However, illustrative cycle of Blank and Fradkin is not only monument of its time. Long before the Second World War and Holocaust, they already foresaw the world catastrophes on the material of the European history of XVIth century. At same time, they did not abandon of expressive and decorative style characteristic of their teachers, and even continued this style, slightly modifying.