Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Mexico, and which contains codes telling us that we are witnessing acts of humour, as
discussed in chapter one.
This chapter draws on analysis of forty five issues of Hermelinda Linda, seventy
eight of La Familia Burrón and thirty seven of Los Agachados. The number of issues
analysed depended on the availability of the materials. The national library in Mexico
has an important collection of La Familia Burrón, but Los Agachados was consulted
through private collections, which provided a fair amount of copies. Hermelinda Linda
issues are more difficult to find, and unfortunately, not even Óscar González, his
creator, has a complete collection. He is missing almost all the years considered for this
research, so, only a few of them could be consulted in his private collection, and the
other issues were obtained through collectors, who indeed, are not too many.
First, I will briefly outline the history of these three comic books, discussing
their creators, their impact in Mexico, the content and structure. This will help us
become familiar with them inside and outside their pages. This will be followed by the
analysis which is organised and justified by the theories of humour discussed in chapter
one. These are incongruity, exaggeration, superiority, relief, and breaking of the rule.
The first two help us to identify humour, while the others are outlets which explain the
use of humour to enunciate certain ideas and the benefits obtained by doing so. The
images were examined through the methodology described in appendix one which,
broadly, observed not only the image, but also the written narrative, such as balloons
and captions. With this methodology it was possible to find elements that can be
labelled as humour, as well as facts which are related to social preoccupations at the
time. The analysis works as a microscopic observation. We will start by observing small
fragments of the discourse and just one mechanism of humour. By adding more
mechanisms and observing larger pieces of narrative, we will notice that the contents
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