Humor in Discourse

Abstract

Three main approaches to humor in discourse will be discussed in this article: (1) the semantic/pragmatic analyses, which seek to identify the necessary and sufficient properties for a text to be potentially humorous and the modalities of distribution of humor within the texts; (2) the conversation and discourse analysis‐based functionalist theories, which see the affiliative and disaffiliative social functions of humor as the primary functions of humor; and, (3) the corpus‐based approaches that supplement the functional analysis with an emphasis on quantitative questions.