The Study of Sarcasm used by Superhero Characters in Avengers: Infinity War

Abstract

In this research, the attention is drawn upon the sarcastic utterances used by the superhero charactersin the movie Avengers: Infinity War. The interesting point of this movie is that the use of sarcastic utterances are made quite excessively by superhero characters towards the other superheroes or the villain. As mentioned previously, sarcasm is defined as remarks in which meanings are conveyed as different from the actual utterance, which aimed to mock or insult (Togeby, 2016). There are two main theories used in this study, the theory of Cooperative Principle proposed by Grice (1975) and the purposes of sarcasm cited by Attardo (2001). This study found that superhero characters are shown to speak more sarcastically towards each other with 16 occurrences out of 21 utterances in total, meanwhile it is only 5 occurrences towards the villain characters. There are several purposes of sarcasm that have the same number of occurrences in films, namely sarcasm used as group affiliation, sophistication, politeness, and retractability. The sarcastic utterances that fall into this category were uttered 4 times each by superhero characters, this shows that the sarcastic utterances spoken in this study are quite varied and almost shared equally.