Visualized kinesic humor in silent comic strips

Abstract Unexpected movements, represented verbally or nonverbally, can give rise to cognitive shifts that function as incongruities leading to kinesic humor. The visual narrative form of silent comic strips relies on depiction of movements in humorous storytelling, and echoes the sensorimotor nature of kinesic humor. The current study adopts a cognitive-pragmatic perspective to study visualized kinesic humor in silent comic strips. Based on a holistic understanding of visual explicatures/implicatures, this study proposes general associations between narrative tokens such as various images or effect lines and their kinesic fortes reflected with inferential activities. Incorporating the concepts of jab line and hyperdetermination in humor studies into the incongruity-resolution approach, detailed analyses are conducted to demonstrate how kinesic humor is visually realized with narrative tokens, cognitively processed through inferencing, and structurally subsumed into a multilayered humor complex in silent comic strips.