Multimodality in Saudi Arabian COVID-19 Cartoons: A Thematic and Humour Analysis

Abstract

The present study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic was portrayed in Saudi cartoons and how humour around it was created. The Youm7 website was employed as a data source. A total of 212 multimodal cartoons were collected between December 2019 (the date on which COVID-19 was announced to the world) and March 2021 (the date when Saudi Arabia lifted all the restrictions related to the pandemic). These cartoons underwent two different types of analysis and resampling to address the two primary aims specified above. In addressing the pandemic’s portrayal in the cartoons, content analysis and multimodal analysis were employed to deduce the thematic presentation and participants' representation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerning humour creation, adapting and adopting Yus’ (2016, 2021) incongruity-resolution classification along with humour forms (Dynel, 2009; Alsadi & Howard, 2021) was applied with a more stratified sample involving 61 cartoons.

The findings reveal ten main themes with their sub-themes. These are virus transmission rate, the emotional and physical consequences of COVID-19, the impact on education and work, vaccine rollout, lockdown, international political discourse, public protection, the change in social relations, the impact on travel and tourism, as well as the economic impact of COVID-19. Moreover, these themes show some similarities and differences with existing research in relation to phases of the pandemic. On the other hand, the deduced sub-themes depend more on the Saudi phases, government actions, and people's reactions. The findings also present five main subjects: COVID-19, earth, Saudi men and women, Saudi authorities, and international countries and governments. The representation of the participants varies multimodally in relation to the four phases of the pandemic in Saudi Arabia. Regarding the humour creation, the results show that the three Yus’ (2021) incongruities (frame-based, writing-image and writing-based) and resolutions (implication-based, frame-based, and writing-based) are presented in the data. However, the findings show the addition of a fourth classification (image-based) along with the three presented classifications to be applicable to cartoons, resulting in 15 common taxonomies. Moreover, eight humour forms were identified: joke, putdown, pun, irony, exaggeration, metaphor, metonymy, and comparison. These humour forms are mostly shown to occur multimodally, but they also sometimes occur in image or in writing mode alone. The relationship between humour forms and incongruity was found to be mostly dependent on the shared mode. The representation of humour, in general, is found to be based on three factors: the cartoonists’ interest, linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge.

This study contributes to understanding the history of Saudi Arabia during the pandemic (2020-2021). Moreover, the study contributes to the growth of multimodality by showing its essence in deducing the thematic presentation and the creation of humour. It also contributes to the field of humour, specifically making a methodological contribution by introducing an adaptation of Yus' (2021) incongruity-resolution theoretical approach, as this represents the first application of the approach to cartoons. Overall, the combination of humour and multimodality contributes to the shifting tendency from focusing on pure linguistics to multimodal communication.