The challenge of dissecting the frog: cartoonists analyze their creative process

Abstract

This article delves into two intrinsic tensions present in humor and cartoons: funniness-seriousness and repetition-novelty. The focus is on the perspectives of cartoonists regarding the semiotic and rhetorical resources they put into play to create humor and satire. In this way, the study echoes a key question in semiotics, and particularly in multimodal studies: how image and words interplay in meaning-making. With that aim, a questionnaire was designed and filled out by 100 cartoonists from 22 different countries. The responses were analyzed applying mixed methods (content analysis, non-parametric statistical techniques, and network analysis). Based on the findings, four distinct profiles of cartoonists were identified, ranging from those who prioritize multimodality (the largest group) to those who favor the verbal mode. Cartoonists who prioritize the visual mode and skeptics to humor analysis fall in between. The article also discusses the various rhetorical resources that cartoonists declare to use to create humor, with irony and sarcasm being the most frequent ones, while puns are the least common. The results are examined in relation to the cartoonists’ conceptions of humor, satire, and the cartoon genre, as well as the different dimensions they considered when discussing their humor style. The study contributes to gaining a deeper understanding of the ways cartoonists use image and writing to create humor and satire and sheds light on an under-researched area in this field.