Linguistic analyses of Verbal Humor In Persian

ABSTRACT: Study of humor has attracted the interest and attention of researchers for centuries. In recent years, the study of humor occupies an important place in linguistics and researchers present different theories. This research was done by analytic-descriptive method. In this research ,we studied the one hundred of Persian jokes. The most parts of these jokes are taken from Internet sites, thus after exploring all the jokes, we omitted some of these jokes because of including obscene words and political, cultural and social reasons. In next step , we omitted dull jokes and among rest of the jokes , those who make fun of certain ethnicities ,omitted and we used instead, words like “that person”. Then these jokes were explored by General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH). This theory is presented by Raskin and Attardo in 1991. Under the GTVH , there are six parameters in which jokes can differ: script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy and language. The main focus of this research were on answering these questions : Is the GTVH appropriate for analyzing all Persian jokes? And also which kind of these parameters are more than the others in Persian jokes? The results of this research with utilization of descriptive statistics showed that GTVH is quiet satisfactory and useful for analyzing Persian jokes and among different kinds of script oppositions: smart/dumb opposition, among different kinds of logical mechanism: false analogy and among different kinds of narrative strategies : combination of descriptive and dialogue forms had the most affluence .