Kicking Ass with Style: Linguistic Humor Strategies in Three High-Grossing Action Movie Franchises

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the American action hero has become increasingly humor-conscious as he disarms the villains through superior strength but also through superior wit. It is the aim of this study to, from a linguistics perspective, investigate the action hero's use of humor in so-called action blockbusters, i.e. high octane, high-grossing action movies. The corpus for this study consists of action movie franchises that have become box office successes and whose heroes are representative of humor in the action genre. Through an analysis of the dialogue in these action movies, based on the theoretical framework of previous linguistic humor studies, quantitative and qualitative data was obtained. Additionally, a test screening was conducted with a test audience to verify the obtained data. The results show a dominance of sarcasm and insults in all three movies as the prime linguistic sources of humor. However, their occurrence could not be quantified in exact terms since the test screening proved the initial hypothesis inconclusive. Instead, their occurrence was estimated by the test audience. The hero uses humor as a social management function, partially to assert his dominance over villains. This he achieves firstly through sarcasm and insults, and secondly through puns and foul language, which the audience typically perceive as funny. Depending on the character, the findings differed in terms of average word per sentence and foul language.