Adolescents creating cartoons: A developmental study of humor

Abstract

Developmental studies on humor have historically approached a limited age range - from birth until early adolescence - and have mostly considered humor interpretation and the production of situational and verbal humor. Focusing on cartooning, a highly demanding cognitive and communication activity, in this paper we aim to provide empirical data drawn from a larger age span than usual - 10 to 18 years old - to better understand what adolescents find humorous and how they create humor. Our corpus comes from nine workshops of cartoon production and interpretation conducted between 2015 and 2018, in which a total of 63 girls and 72 boys participated. Based on a fine-grained cognitive and communication analysis, we distinguished six different profiles of texts depending on: whether and how a fictional situation (i.e. a humorous incongruity) was built, its relation to the referenced situation addressed (topic), and the author's motivation. Simple Correspondence Analyses enabled us to identify that these texts varied according to the adolescents' age and the cartoon's format (single panel or strip). Greater cognitive sophistication was evidenced in single panel cartoons and among middle and late adolescents, who also showed a concern for social issues. Some gender variations were found.