Analysis of the incongruities in the ironical expressions in Kansiime’s jokes

Abstract

The objective of this study was to analyse the incongruities in the ironical expressions incongruities in her jokes. The interpretation of Kansiime’s jokes was done as an expansion in Kansiime’s jokes. This study was a pragmatic approach to the study of comedy. It looked at how one Ugandan comedian, Anne Kansiime, uses irony to create of the applicability of Relevance Theory in the interpretation of texts. In assessing Kansiime's sketches, an insight was drawn into how hearers can interpret texts to perceive them as humorous. Having adopted the relevance theoretical framework, which tries to give an account of how hearers interpret texts during verbal communication, it necessitated that we define the place of the hearer and, at the same time that of the speaker since the comedian endeavours to judge their minds. For a successful interpretation of a text during a given discourse, the hearer must be able to judge the intentions of the speaker, while the speaker must also be able to give sound context for the interpretation process. For this reason, this study alludes to these concepts by looking at how the speaker, who in this case is the humorist, is able to judge the minds of her audience and subsequently judge what the audience will attend to as relevant during a given discourse.