Pragmatics of Humour in a Nigerian University's Departmental Chat Rooms

Abstract

This chapter develops an elaborated Pragmatic Act Model (ePAM) and applies it to humorous interactions in students' text chats in a Nigerian university. The model draws insights from Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH), Mey's Pragmatic Act theory and incorporates current issues in pragmatic theorising such as the dialectics between a priori and co-constructed, emergent intention. The data for the study is got from three departmental chat room interactions in Federal University of Technology, Akure. Four humour types are analysed: canned jokes, punning/wordplay, question and answer jokes, and hyperbole/overstatement. Similarly, five pragmatic acts are performed in the identified humour types, namely, satirising, eliciting laughter, electioneering, teasing and overstating. In each of the humour types, the pragmatic mechanism drawn upon to comprehend the joke and to perform the pragmatic acts is indicated. Overall, the chapter argues that the effective appreciation of any humour act would require a pragmatically and culturally enriched context.

exploration of phonological jokes in Maryam Apaokagi's selected comedy skits

“…Being a phenomenon that is present in very many cultures, humour has been studied in so many cultural contexts, and its cultural peculiarities are revealed in these different situations. Within the Nigerian context, humour has been studied in situation comedies (Bamgbose & Ehondor 2021;Sunday & Bamgbose 2021), stand-up comedies (Filani 2017;Soneye 2019), computer-mediated communication (Inya 2016), comedy skits (Adesoye 2018), literature (Alabi 2021) and even music (Bamgbose 2019). Its features, functions and strategies have also been explored in detail by several scholars.…”

A pragmatic analysis of humour strategies and functions in 'Jenifa's Diary' and 'Professor JohnBull'

“…However, much has generally been done on humour in Nigeria in other forms of discourse, such as stand-up comedy (Adetunji, 2013;Filani, 2015;Sunday & Filani, 2019), movies (Brown, 2008;Ehiemua, 2008) and computer-mediated communication (Inya 2016;Lamidi 2016;Taiwo 2016). Filani (2015) analyses how Nigerian stand-up comedians manipulate the parameters of an activity type so as to achieve their interactional goals in their performances, while Filani (2016) is interested in discourse types that emanate from the humour performed by stand-up comedians on Night of a Thousand Laughs, so as to decipher the two major contexts evoked in the selected performances, namely context of the joke and context in the joke.…”

“…Ehiemua (2014) examines the iconic, indexical and symbolic signs which provoke laughter in two Nigerian apolitical movie comedies, NnaaMeen and Touch and Follow. Inya (2016) applies an elaborated pragmatic acts model to humorous interactions in students' text chats in a Nigerian university. The study reports pragmatic acts such as satirising, eliciting laughter, electioneering, teasing and overstating.…”