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Part of
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 267–293

Chapter 14
Newspaper funnies at the dawn of modernity

Multimodal humour in early American comic strips

This article offers a model for the analysis of comics, focusing on a classic of American Sunday newspapers: Outcault’s The Yellow Kid. As an early form of Press humour, these strips provide lavish material for the analysis of multimodal discourse and at the same time lend themselves to a study of the sociocultural and ideological constitution of America at the emergence of modernity. The analytical model is a threefold framework covering structural elements (“modes”), sociological elements (“functions”) and semantic elements (“mechanisms”). With these interpretive tools, it is expected that the construction of humorous meaning, as well as the usage of various semiotic resources for amusement purposes, becomes clearer. Moreover, the article glimpses at the nature of late nineteenth-century American society, in its vibrant, yet challenging, evolution.
Keywords: Comics, multimodality, humour, press, discourse, semantic, semiotic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tracing the origin of comics
  • 3.Legitimizing comics: Popular culture studies
  • 4.Analysing comics: Semiotics, visual rhetoric and linguistics
  • 5.A model for the analysis of comics
  • 6.The Yellow Kid: Applying the model
    • 6.1Feudal pride in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.2Real Enjoyment
    • 6.3Merry Xmas Morning in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.4The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.5The Yellow Kid Experiments with the Wonderful Hair Tonic
    • 6.6A Dark Secret; Or How the Yellow Kid Took a Picture
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 29 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.14erm
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