Are you serious?! Humour in Journalism

Abstract

This article aims at speaking “in” humour and not “about” humour in journalistic discourse. Specifi cally, the goal is to deconstruct the dichotomy between the seriousness of the journalism and the lack of seriousness in humor, in order to show that this separation is actually an ideological strategy, based on a conception of language as representation of the world that constantly calls the notion of truth and objectivity to legitimize the events it describes. The theoretical framework is the theory of speech acts (Austin, 1990) and Linguistic Pragmatics (Mey, 1993 and Rajagopalan, 2003).