The language of humour: From the texts of Karagöz to nowaday's humour texts

03. Summary Human beings differ from other creatures not only by their ability to think but also their ability to laugh. As a previledge of human beings, laughing relaxes people mentally; socializes the people and unites the society. Also it is a power that points to the mistakes, disorders and demolish the bad order. Therefore, sometimes it is subject to suppression by goverment since it is a threat for the sovereign powers. There is no enough research on laughing because of the prejudice about it. However, because of its essential place in social life, it is something that needs to be analzyed in a very detailed way. This master's thesis aims to fill the gap in the research on the laughing phenomenon. The first section fulfills the aim to create a Turkish study that sums up the theory of laughing. In the second section, the reasons of laughing and the usage of the language of humour in creating those reasons, is discussed. Moreover, the forms of language play that are used by humour are indicated. In the meantime, it is observed that just as the language of poetry, language of humour also deviates from the daily language in the forms of deviation, parallelism, repetition. Inspired by this observation, it is claimed that this deviation from daily language is the common characteristic of the language of humour and poetry, and they differ in the way that they use the emotions, which is aimed to be proven by some examples. In the third section, the theory on the usage of the language of humour is applied to three works of humour which represent the old and novel humour. In this application, the indicated forms of language play are analyzed by comparisons, and as a product of these observations, the second claim, 'the subject of humour changes, however the structure does not', is aimed to be proven. Besides the language plays themselves, the repetition, deviation, parallelism phenomenons and the reasons of laughing (laughing theory) is again addressed. In the conclusions section, the results of the research are discussed.