Humour as a powerful tool to reach the audience in TED Talk presentations: a Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Treball Final de Grau en Estudis Anglesos. Codi: EA0938. Curs acadèmic: 2019/2020This paper reflects on the importance of humour and its presentation and use in general communication and specifically in TED Talk presentations. Humans are depicted as social beings and there is a main aim to achieve when two or more individuals relate together: interaction. To do so, different strategies may be used while the interaction takes place, but there is one which implies, in most cases, a response on the hearer and it is undoubtedly humour. Several factors may influence on how humour is presented in communication, which may be the audience, the situation and the cultural context. Hence, TED Talks are considered to be influenced by these considerations too, due to the fact that these conferences take place by different presenters in diverse parts of the world. Taking into account the little research that the issue of humour in conferences has received, this work aims at researching on how humour is presented in the speakers’ speeches regarding health issues and why do presenters decide to resort to humour when dealing with thorny issues. To do so, both the humour samples and the produced responses in the general audience will be analysed to reach a general conclusion on this essential communicative strategy