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.