Humour in Macanese Creole literature as an identity creator and consolidator

Macanese Creole survives in literary works of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. This paper explores comic literature, which constitutes the bulk of the existing corpus in this language, and analyses how this genre relates to the creation and maintenance of a Macanese identity represented as distinct from surrounding historically and demographically significant identities. I resort to the incongruity theory and to some relevant knowledge resources (script opposition, situation, target, and language) of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo and Raskin, 1991; Attardo, 2001; 2008) to analyse how comic literature in Macanese fabricates a fictionalised and performative memory connected to the way in which the Macanese wish to see themselves and be seen by others.