La ironía y el humor en El Habla de Monterrey

Abstract

This paper focuses on fragments of interviews from a sociolinguistic corpus which represents the whole universe of analysis. We concentrate our attention on five fragments with the purpose of examining the links between irony and its most frequent companion: humour, and its manifestations as expressed in the discourse of the interviews: laughter, mockery, self-mockery. Humour, in the presence of irony, expresses itself through various textual genres in the interviews. Here we concentrate only on parody. In order to explain the problem, we turn to Kristeva’s proposal on intertextuality; to Bergsons´view of laughter and comicality; and to Freuds´analysis of laughter, comicality and humour in relation with the subconscious. From Jorge Padilla we take the ideas of relax, humour and irony, and from T. Bubnova the concepts of laughter and popular culture. The subjects use humour expressed in laughter, mockery and self-mockery when they use ironize against others and themselves because these offer them the opportunity to perfom a profanation, to disacralize social hierarchies and discourse tones. They offer them a view of an upside down world that looks for equity, although ephemeral and ideal.