The Understanding of Humor in Turkish Comedy Films: A Reading on Selected films in the 1970s and the 2010s

Fundamentally, all societies are constantly in a process of change and development. Social events such as technological, financial, martial, or political are all effective components to assist the process of change of societies. While many social events are occurring in society, cinema would be affected by those happenings in manydimensional manners as well. The ideology of some specific times, directly or indirectly, are taking their place in our lives, and films being an instrument to display and represent the ideologies of that times. Therefore, this study targeted to investigate past and present traces of Turkish comedy films from the Yeşilçam era to the new Turkish cinema period to collect and bridge data to nowadays to be able to understand and compare the alterations in sense of humor. To achieve this aim, three theories of humor (superiority, incongruity, and relief) have been used in the study to deconstruct the humorous moments in selected Turkish comedy films. The selected films ‘‘Tosun Paşa (1976), Şaban Oğlu Şaban (1977), Kibar Feyzo (1978), Recep İvedik (2015), Düğün Dernek 2: Sünnet (2017), and Arif v 216 (2018)’’ have been read with the methodology of textual analysis to understand and highlight key points of humorous moments. To elaborate and understand the structure of humor three theories of humor are applied to the study. Additionally, Ferdinand de Saussure’s dyadic model and Stuart Hall’s theory of representation took place in the study. To sum up, the final analysis shows that there are some differences in sense of humor. The first difference is criticism of power relations in the films are disappeared in new Turkish cinema period, and the second difference is the conversational and behavioral patterns of the characters changed to establish humor.