El humor en la crónica deportiva: Recursos humorísticos de Andrés Montes en las narraciones de la NBA

Abstract

Humor is an interdisciplinary and multifunctional phenomenon. As a genre, humor appears under different formats (jokes, monologues, parodies, sketches…), and, at the same time, is a powerful resource for non humorous genres (Ruiz Gurillo 2012, 2019). In the field of Sports, humor has been a distinguishing mark in basketball broadcasting by well-known commentator Andrés Montes, a Sport celebrity because of his NBA narrations together with journalist Antoni Daimiel. In order to analyze the humorous resources displayed in these basketball broadcastings, which represent a historical period in this sport, we work with a corpus made up of three games played between 1998 and 2002 and a slam dunk, all of them outstanding examples of the narrative style of both professionals. There we can find examples like Aerolíneas Jordan (Jordan airlines), ¡jugón! (goat!), ¡Viiiilmaaaa, ábreme la puerta! (Wilmaaa, open the door!), together with endless creative nicknames turning his discourse into a personal brand. The analysis of more than eight hours of narratives from different theories of humor (Raskin 1985; Attardo 1994, 2001; Ruiz Gurillo 2012, 2016) and Cognitive Linguistics as a conceptual framework (Brône, Feyaerts & Veale 2015) allows us to understand the humorous resources displayed to make the NBA broadcasting more expressive: metaphors, metonymies, paronomies, polysemy, intertexts and onomatopoeias, together with a particular prosody illustrated along 20 examples. The mastery of these resources turned Andrés Montes into an icon of basketball journalism in Spanish. Ultimately, his legacy is an excellent example of the presence of humor in non humorous genres and, furthermore, a rich source of study for Cognitive Linguistics.