Eureka of Bisociation: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Satirical Caricatures on the Egyptian Pound Floatation

The present paper investigates, from a cognitive perspective, the production of humour in terms of creativity through the analysis of some selected caricatures about the Egyptian Pound Floatation (EPF). The analysis is tackled from a cognitive linguistic point of view using Berthold’s (2012) Bisociative Knowledge Discovery (BKD), which is based on Koestler's (1964) Theory of Bisociation as presented in his book The Act of Creation. Koestler's theory states that humor is created via linking (or bisociating in Koestler's term) two incompatible trains of thought in order to come up with a novel meaning that is both logical and unexpected. The study is cognitive as it confirms the cognitive linguistic principle which illustrates that language is thought; Cognitive Linguistics studies describe the manner by which language shapes thoughts. In this paper ten caricatures portraying the Egyptian financial crisis the EPF are analyzed to show that visual and verbal means of expressions, conceptually and satirically reveal the situation in the Egyptian society. To be more specific, it illustrates that visual and verbal conceptual techniques are tools of satire to perceive the economic and social drawbacks of this crisis. The analysis concludes that the integration (Bisociation as used by Koester) of the two trains of thought brings about the concepts of fear, suffering, threat, death, suicide, and poverty as the outcomes of the EPF (Eureka of Bisociation in the caricatures