Introduction

Abstract

"So much has been said about humour that it is even corny to know what it is. But not knowing what it is is much more corny". This is how Clarín - in the Almanaque de Madrid cómico, 1890 - put his taunts against mediocre humourists. In rather more recent times, Fernando Iwasaki denounced that "humour in the Spanish language -despite Cervantes and Borges- [has] a very bad press, because countless editors, critics and readers confuse irony with jokes and paradox with bad humour" (Iwasaki 2013). Beyond the macroscopic errors due to ignorance, a certain terminological imprecision may derive, at least in part, from the characteristics of a truly complex phenomenon, which makes use of heterogeneous resources, often resorting to the frequent contamination of strategies also used in other discursive registers.