A pragmatic approach to Kenyan stand -up comedy: A study of selected Eric Omondi's performances.
Abstract
This study is a pragmatic analysis of Kenyan stand-up comedies. The study looks into
the use of various stereotypes and how they cause laughter to the audience or the
hearer using a Relevance-Theoretical approach. This study explores how the comedians
manipulate the encyclopedic knowledge of the audience so as to achieve humorous
effects. It also demonstrates how the hearer (audience) understands a joke using the
comprehension procedure of Relevance Theory.
It was observed that stereotypes are effective in creating humor through incongruity
that is, the violation of the world knowledge of the audience and the comedian and also
the violations of the socially and culturally agreed norms. Code switching and code
mixing was frequently used to reinforce and mark out the beginning and the end of the
punch line thus playing a vital role in enhancing the understanding of jokes.
This research project is organized into five chapters. Chapter one focuses on the
background information of the study. This includes; background of the study,
objectives, statement of the problem, theoretical framework, and literature review and
finally data analysis.
The second chapter identifies and classifies the stereotypes found in the data into four
categories namely: stereotypes on gender, stereotypes on tribes, stereotypes on
nationalities and regions, and stereotypes on body sizes.
The third chapter explores the use of incongruity and code-switching in the identified
stereotypes in manipulating the audience's encyclopedic knowledge of the world so as
to create humorous effects.
The fourth chapter analyzes data against Yus (2008) Relevance Theoretical classification
of jokes. This chapter thus focuses on the explicatures and implicatures in the
stereotypes and how humor is created through this. Finally chapter five gives the
summary and conclusions of the study. It also gives recommendations for further study
on this topic.
Citation
Degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics,Publisher
University of Nairobi,
Collections
- Faculty of Education (FEd) [5979]