Humor and satire in children and adolescents' cartoons

LUCÍA BUGALLO; CONSTANZA ZINKGRÄF; ANA PEDRAZZINI

S. C. de Bariloche

Workshop; Humor and satire today: cultural, Political and media perspectives; 2018

IDEAyCO, Grupo de Estudios Cognitivos y Culturales vinculado al Instituto Patagónico de Estudios de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, CONICET - Universidad Nacional del Comahue.

In this presentation we intend to provide empirical support for two main arguments: 1) from an early stage, children and adolescents are capable of using and combining different visual and verbal resources to produce cartoons and 2) far from being just an entertainment, cartooning allows to resignify personal experiences and to problematize the social reality. Based on the analysis of 149 cartoons made by children and adolescents aged 10 to 19 in formal and informal educational settings in San Carlos de Bariloche city, our results show that 9/10 participants were able to produce humorous cartoons and to represent the humorous peak. When exploring variations according to age and gender, we found out that the ability to produce cartoons, the author's motivations, the topics adressed and the sources of humor varied according to age. Gender did not vary according to any of the aforementioned categories. Finally, there were no age and gender preferences when selecting which format of cartoons (single panel or strips) to produce.