The humorous dimension of intertextual relations in contemporary Slovak creolized media text

Abstract

In the article, we focused on the aspect of humour in the contemporary Slovak media discourse through the prism of the humorous potential of intertextuality. In order to grasp manifestations of intertextuality and understand how the intertextual joke functions, we turned to the concept of verbal and non-verbal precedent phenomenon (as the intertextual code of the linguo-cultural society) established in the modern Russian scholarship. Through the covers of the popular Slovak weekly .tyždeň from 2014-2019 (in total 271 issues of which 90 have an intertextual nature, and 62 of 90 "intertextual covers" can be characterized as "intertextual jokes"), we analyze what types of precedent phenomena are most commonly used in the recent Slovak creolized text and what methods of working with intertext are applied in order to achieve the intertextual joke. We have come to the conclusion that "the effect of defeated expectation" and the creation of the inconsistency of the connotative meaning of the precedent phenomenon and the situation (context) in which it is used, are the most frequent methods of achieving the intertextual joke. It was interesting to discover that for the deciphering of intellectual "intertextual riddles" with a humorous effect, Slovak authors predominantly provide the Slovak reader with precedent phenomena connected not with the Slovak, but with the European or worldwide cultural space, or that the visual precedent phenomena are more dominant over the verbal precedent phenomena in conveying the intertextual jokes in the creolized texts.