A visual literary study of humour in the works Of tilapia da cartoonist

Abstract

The study is a visual literary analysis of the nature of humour utilised in Tilapia Da Cartoonist’s memes, the text and visuals he uses to encourage humour, and the roles humour plays in his memes. Memes created by Tilapia Da Cartoonist from 2019 to 2020 serve as the primary data. His page on Facebook served as the source of primary data. Tilapia Da Cartoonist is a Media General Group employee who enjoys visual communication and concept development. He is a well-known cartoonist who has gained the admiration of many internet users for his imaginative works that mainly satirise Ghana’s economic, political, educational, and social realities. The descriptive qualitative method is the approach used, with the research design being semiotic analysis. The basic theoretical frameworks of the study are the superiority and incongruity theories. The findings make it clear that the cartoonist makes use of wordplay, sarcasm, irony, satire, and parody as the types of humour in his 2019 and 2020 memes. They also show that psychological, power-based, and solidarity-based roles are the functions of humour. The study concludes that the intensity and seriousness of a situation are easily interpreted when both text and images are used in a meme to convey a message.