Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Research in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Critical Pragmatic Analysis of Black Humor in Trevor Noah’s Lost in Translation
Dr. Masoumah abathar Witwit
ABSTRACT:
This study investigates black humor in Trevor Noah’s stand-up comedy show Lost in Translation. Cambridge Dictionary defines black humor as a humorous way of looking at or treating something that is serious or sad. This study aims at finding out how Trevor Noah uses different critical pragmatic devices to influence the audience in his Lost in Translation Show. The problem of this study is that the use of different critical pragmatic devices by Trevor Noah in his show has not been investigated before and there is a need to explore the impact of the use of such critical pragmatic devices on the audience. This study is significant since it tries to understand the impact of stand-up comedy shows on their audience. It is also significant since it sheds light on the use of ideological discursive strategies by Travor Noah as a resistant discourse for resisting oppression against different types of people like Muslims and racism against black people. This study hypothesizes that Trevor Novah uses devices like speech acts, presuppositions and different ideological devices like exaggeration, repetition and telling stories for exposing dominant ideologies and resisting them.
keywords: black humor, stand-up comedy, pragmatic strategies, ideological strategies, resistant discourse, Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia, satire, sarcasm