Gaziantep folk culture elements and humor in Çeled Uşaglar theater

Humor, which means irony, intended to amuse, make laugh, and taunt someone's behavior without hurting it; is a genre that exists in every society that contains supracultural features in which different fields and behaviors are used as material in human history, from word games to dialect differences, social satires, meaningful and meaningless movements. It was accepted in the 15th century that laughter and humor, whose origins are very old, are a mental element. The way and place of humor to be used was researched in the 16th century, and in the 18th century, it started to show itself in artistic and literary texts in today's sense. As a result of the researches, there have been three accepted theories. The subject of this study is Çeled Uşaglar, a local theater example in Gaziantep. Established in 2009, the Çeled Uşaglar theater school brought the elements of Gaziantep folk culture, which disappeared or were on the verge of being forgotten in the process to the stage. In this study, it is aimed to exâmine the way a local theater handles traditional culture, the sources it is fed on, the audience-audience relationship and the local sense of humor. In this context, content analysis, which is one of the qualitative research methods in social sciences, and the survey technique, one of the quantitative research methods, were used to measure the audience-listener comments and reactions. The study is limited to twenty-five plays by Çeled Uşaglar, the YouTube channel, which is the social media account opened by the theater team, and digital content from Orhan Uslu. In the study, it has been determined that Çeled Uşaglar Theater School reflects Gaziantep folk culture products and humorous elements in the plays they play. In the analyzed plays, it was seen that Gaziantep folk culture found a different performance environment in terms of cultural transmission and continuity through the Çeled Uşaglar Theater. As an example of local theater, Çeled Uşaglar has created an important awareness by using humor both in Gaziantep city life and on a national scale.