Means of informal communication in political cartoons

This article attempts to analyze means of communication such as euphemisms and dysphemisms in a political cartoon. Free expression of personal and public opinion, political humor and political cartoon became an important part of the information sphere. This makes the genre of political cartoon more relevant than ever. The cartoon consists of verbal and visual components, which make the choice of communication tools in the text especially difficult. This determined the problem of our study. We have analyzed political cartoons published in the American media. Using the method of content analysis, we selected 174 euphemisms and dysphemisms, which we divided into lexical-semantic categories. As a result, euphemisms are used frequently in political cartoon than dysphemisms, which, is caused by the genre specificity, thus, the ironical effect is achieved by the contrast between the verbal and visual components