A Study Of Humor In Ice Age From The Perspective Of Multimodality

Humor is a common phenomenon in our daily life. It can decrease pressure, eraseawkwardness, help creating relaxing and pleasant atmosphere, and shorten the distancebetween people. Thus, humor is a topic that has attracted much attention and the study ofhumor has gone a long way. Traditionally, theories of humor are divided into three groups:incongruity theories, hostility theories, and release theories. Scholars both at home and abroadhave studied humor from the perspective of rhetoric, pragmatics，semantics, and cognition.However, traditional researches mainly focus on the study of verbal humor. In modern digitaltimes, language is not the only factor that can produce humorous effect, though it isconsidered as a really important one. The author notices that, in most cases, humor iscomposed of more than one mode, and the interpretation of humor is based on the interactionof different modes. This thesis is trying to analyze humor from the perspective ofmultimodality, trying to find out how different modes work together to create humorouseffect.In recent20years, multimodality has become a hot topic both at home and abroad. Thestudies of multimodality are carried out from linguistic and non-linguistic perspective. The“social semiotics” perspective of systemic-functional linguistics is deemed as the main trendin the study of this field. What’s more, Halliday’s meta-function of language provides atheoretical foundation for the study of multimodality. Lim’s Integrative Multi-semiotic Model(IMM) is applicable to the study of multimodal text composed of both language and visualimages. On the basis of SFL and Lim’s IMM, Zhang Delu proposes a Synthetic TheoreticalFramework of MDA (STF of MDA) which contains four levels: the culture level, the contextlevel, the content level and the expression level. The present study takes Zhang Delu’s STF ofMDA as theoretical framework, trying to investigate the synergy between different modes inproducing humorous effect in an American animated movie Ice Age. In this framework, cultural context is basic context, and situational context is specific context. In certainsituational context, all kinds of modes interact and cooperate with each other throughcomplementary and non-complementary relations to evoke humor. To better fulfill therequirement of the study, the author collected147examples from Ice Age.Through the investigation of humor in Ice Age, it is found that the synergies betweenvisual modes and auditory modes are of vital importance in producing humorous effect. Theauditory mode realized by linguistic media and the visual mode realized by image media arethe two main modes composing humor in the movie. And the synergies between visual modesand auditory modes form complementary relation and non-complementary relation. Thecomplementary relation is subdivided into reinforcement and non-reinforcement and thenon-complementary relation can be further divided into overlapping, inclusion andcontext-interaction.It is also found that, in producing humorous effect, reinforcement relation takes thelargest portion in the synergy. The proportion of reinforcement in the synergy betweenmono-modes accounts for71.74%and reinforcement between mono-mode and multi-modestakes up85.30%. In non-complementary relation, context-interaction gets the largest portionwhich amounts to78.95%.In the movie, the auditory modes are realized by linguistic media and other sonic media.In the synergy between visual mode and auditory mode realized by linguistic media, theauditory mode is always foregrounded. However, in the synergy between visual mode andauditory mode realized by other sonic media, visual mode is always foregrounded. All themodes in the movie interact and coordinate with each other to produce humorous effect.The significance of the study lies in two aspects. First, the study may help people to havea better understanding of multimodality of humor and know more about the formationmechanism of humor. Second, the present study, to some degree, can help people to createmore humor through the synergies between different modes.