Humor in Trevor Noah’s Lost in Translation: A Critical Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

This study deals with humor and specifically black humor in Trevor Noah’s stand-up comedy show Lost in Translation. Cambridge Dictionary defines humor as “the ability to be amused by something seen, heard, or thought about, sometimes causing you to smile or laugh, or the quality in something that causes such amusement”. Cambridge dictionary defines black humor as a “humorous way of looking at or treating something that is serious or sad”. The main aim of this tudy is finding out how Trevor Noah uses different critical pragmatic strategies to influence the audience in his Lost in Translation Show. The problem of this study is that the use of different critical pragmatic strategies by Trevor Noah in his show has not been investigated before and there is a need to explore the impact of the use of such critical pragmatic devices on the audience. This study is regarded as significant since it attempts to understand the impact of stand-up comedy shows on their audience. It is also significant since it focuses on the use of ideological discursive strategies by Travor Noah as a resistant discourse for resisting oppression against different types of people like Muslims and racism against black people. This study hypothesizes that Trevor Novah uses strategies like speech acts, presuppositions and variant ideological devices like exaggeration, repetition and telling stories for exposing dominant ideologies and resisting them.