Humor in Visual Mode: A study exploring composition and reception of humorous videos by hearing and deaf population

Humor studies have interested researchers since the times of ancient scholars like Plato and Aristotle. Scholars from varied disciples like, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, etc. have been making attempts to understand the phenomenon of humor and its impact on humans. While most research in this field of study examines humor produced in the verbal mode, in other words, humor generated with the help of language, there are relatively fewer studies examining humor in the visual mode. As a result of that there are further limited number of studies that explore humor in purely visual mode, i.e. humor generated in videos without any use of language. Recognizing the need for examining humor that is produced visually alone, without any use of linguistic cues, this study aims to explore the territory of Silent humorous videos. Thus, this thesis is dedicated to examining the mechanisms of humor generation and reception in silent humorous videos. To study the ways in which humor is generated and appreciated in humorous videos we chose to have two sets of target groups: hearing and deaf. It is important that questions such as, how humor is produced in the visual mode, what the elements that contribute to humor in a video are, whether the established theories of humor also lend themselves to generation and/or comprehension of humor in the visual mode, etc. are explored to better understand the phenomenon of humor. Towards this motivation, this thesis aspires to make some contributions that would provide a platform to future research in the area of visual humor and also to professionals who are creators of such content. The primary objectives of this thesis are as follows: o To examine the anatomy of humorous videos focusing on finding the elements in a video that contribute to the humor effect and also explore which elements are more prominent than others in generating humor. o To examine if theories of humor are modality independent and are also applicable to humor in the visual mode. o To understand if and how hearing and deaf population differ in reception and appreciation of humorous videos and if the differences are influenced by the modality of language they use, i.e., verbal or signed. o To explore the relationship between humor and its compositional elements contributing to humor in the visual mode and memory. The above-mentioned objectives of the thesis were addressed with the help of studies designed within the framework of Participant Observer Research. Firstly, a selected number of humorous videos were analyzed in details to understand the generation mechanisms employed by the makers of the videos. Further, a set of participants, from both the target audience groups (hearing and deaf), was selected to watch some humorous videos and their opinions were taken on the humorousness of the videos, their compositional elements and their reception was analyzed. A similar study was then conducted after a certain time to address the examining of memory-humor relationship with respect to humorous videos. Based on the studies, we could confirm that the theories of humor are largely modality independent and visual humor too can be analyzed within the frameworks often used to examine verbal humor. But certain mechanisms of humor generation reach out to people across modalities whereas others appeal more to a particular group of people than others. We also found evidences that confirmed that a person’s language modality influences a person’s humor appreciation.