The people of tourism cartoons

This paper takes a step in the fledgling field of the study of the interface of tourism and humor: it proposes a conceptual approach to the study of visual cartoons, and applies it to an analysis of a collection of about 100 cartoons, from the First International Tourism Cartoon Competition (2010), a cooperative enterprise of the Anadolu University Research Center for Cartoon Art, the (Turkish) Association of Tourism Writers and Journalists (TUYED) and Anatolia: A International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research. A 'demographic' analysis of the tourists depicted on the cartoons constitutes the background to the study of the manner in which the tourists are 'emplotted' on the cartoons, and of the cartoons' humorous point. Three main genres of humor in the cartoons are distinguished: allegories, caricatures and 'mere' jokes. The latter are analyzed in terms of some major themes prevalent in the sociological study of tourism. The general implications of our analysis for the study of visual cartoons and for tourism studies are spelled out in the concluding sections.