Humour translation in the age of multimedia

Humour is undoubtedly a pervasive phenomenon of human life, and it is therefore not surprising that philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and linguists have devoted a good deal of time and effort to studying it. To this end, several scholars have combined theories and approaches proceeding from different fields, thus also offering further proof of the interdisciplinary nature of humour studies. Within linguistics, Raskin’s ( 1985 ) Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH) has been subsequently revised into Attardo and Raskin’s ( 1991 ) General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) (see also Attardo 1994 , 2001 ). Both these theories have correctly been heralded as “the most influential linguistic humour theories of the last two decades” (Br ô ne et!al. 2006 :!203), as also attested by the many studies in different fields that have applied them. The GTVH in particular has been used to investigate various instances of humorous text, and has even been criticised for the benefit of the advancement of the discipline (see Dore 2019a :!27– 30 for an overview). Interestingly, both SSTH and GTVH rely upon concepts such as “incongruity”, “resolution”, “opposition” and “overlapping”, which have been previously conceived to define humour from structuralist, semiotic and cognitive perspectives. These core concepts will be found in many if not all the chapters in this book, thus confirming their inescapable relevance to the overarching understanding of humour and its mechanisms.