HUMOROUS HEADLINES OR FORCED REINTERPRETATIONS? SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE FAKING NEWS AND THE UNREAL TIMES

Abstract

Abstract:- Humour, parody, satire and spoof are marvellous phenomena of language and the human mind. The ability to use them judiciously is a highly desirable milestone in a person’s life. They are such ingredients of entertainment discourse that also serve as the vehicle for disseminating socio-political ideas. The extra-linguistic aspects apart, they are exemplary substances for research in Linguistics because they involve language manipulation & wordplay on the one hand and forced reinterpretation & reverse engineering on the other. Arguably, very little research has taken place with these perspectives.

The headlines constitute the most salient aspect of news items and have become a genre in its own. That is why the headlines have often attracted the focus in linguistic research particularly from the sub-fields like Discourse and Pragmatics. However, the headlines of counterfactual news items have never received the attention they deserve. This paper is a departure from the trend. It concentrates on the linguistic structures and cognitive aspects of the (humorous) headlines of The Faking News (hereafter TFN) and The Unreal Times (hereafter TUT), two online portals for humour, parody, satire and spoof. The language manipulations in their headlines include spelling alternations, word formations, polysemization and ambiguation through wordplay & flouting of the maxims of conversation. The interpretative strategies include plain statements with unexpected elaboration, exaggeration & overextension of proposals, counterfactual accounts of an event, repetition of the statements, straight questions & twisted answers and incongruous linking between true statements. Some of them are contextual, necessitating prior knowledge. While others simply fit into incidents across time and cultures. The former type is ephemeral and constitutes the ‘second generation jokes’ or ‘para jokes’ (see Attardo 2001:70) whereas the later type is ‘conversational jokes’ and constitute the ‘canned jokes.’ Consider the following TFN and TUT headlines as examples:

1.    Indian teen bags “International Calligraphy Award” for writing in public toilets.

1. After constantly losing “National Spelling Bee” to Indian origin kids, US looking for a new national language.
2. UNESCO stops Google from shutting down Orkut, declares it a “heritage site.”
3. With DU admissions delayed, boy puts his marks in bank to earn interest on it and qualify for cut-offs.
4. Making sex education part of school curriculum will make students lose interest in sex: Harsh Vardhan.
5. US to attack King’s Landing to establish democracy after Tyrion tells them about oil beneath it.
6. Delhi University’s FYUP deadlock resolved, students allowed to bunk 1 out of 4 years.
7. Government to pay Google $20 billion for acquiring IRCTC.
8. BMC to dig potholes and fill water in them so that Mumbaikars do not miss the delayed monsoon.

10. First batch of containers leave for Switzerland to fetch black money.

(Source: The Faking News)

The above headlines have two sets of information, both exhibiting some kind of intertextuality. The first would be humourless without the second, while the second would fail to make sense without the first. One perspective on these posts including the headlines, the narrations and the commentaries is that they are instances of mass communication with the potential to inform and entertain the viewers. However, this paper goes beyond the basal description to uncover the attempts of ‘coercive reinterpretations’. As the title suggests, it explores whether the concerned headlines simply humour the viewers or force reinterpretations of the events, linguistic or whatsoever.

At first, this paper discusses news headlines as mini texts and a genre that merits scholarly attention. Then it introduces the relatively new trend of counterfactual reporting as entertainment discourse, which evokes laughter and forces reinterpretation. Next, it presents the striking features of TFN and TUT with special reference to humorous elements in their headlines. These introductions follow the sampling and analysis of their headlines. This paper employs a simple ‘sort and analyse method.’ It searched into the archives of TFN and TUT to build a gigantic corpus of the headlines. Next, it categorized them according to their structural and contextual aspects. Finally, it analyses them by implementing a synthesis of approaches from humour studies and cognitive linguistics.