The Parody of Politicians. Multimodal distorted imitation aimed at political discredit

The paper presents a model of parody, seen as distorted imitation of some object or person aimed at eliciting laughter. A qualitative analysis is presented of the parody of a politician by a comedian. The analysis is carried out through an annotation scheme that describes each sentence, gesture, gaze, facial expression of the parody, and finds out the allusion it bears and the humorous aspects it contains. Finally each point of the parody is classified as to the criteria of evaluation of politicians proposed in previous works: whether the Target is made fun of concerning his competence, benevolence, or dominance. Finally the behavior exhibited by the Parodist is compared with the corresponding real behavior of the Target, in such a way as to single out which features of the Target are imitated in a parody. parody; humor; imitation; multimodality; political communication