On Humor as a Rhetorical Strategy in English Literary Discourse

Authors

  • Nalya Ovshieva

    Independent Researcher, 125040 Moscow, Russia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i12.11091
Received: 15 July 2025 | Revised: 28 July 2025 | Accepted: 9 September 2025 | Published Online: 4 November 2025

Abstract

Indirectness is a valuable communication skill commonly employed to accomplish specific objectives. Motivations for indirect use of language can be politeness, self-defense, or criticism of the other in conversation. Humor has been a subject of extensive study across various disciplines, including linguistics, literature, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary interest stems from both a desire to understand human behavior and an effort to explore how humorous techniques are employed within fictional works to achieve the author's intended effect. The article explores the rhetorical purpose of humorous devices in English literary discourse. In fiction, writers resort to humor as a means of ridiculing a certain trait of a character. The forms of humor include irony, understatement, sarcasm, self-deprecation, wit, satire, etc. The analysis has shown that writers most often use the strategies of initial, final, or double focus, placing humorous devices at the beginning, at the end, or at the centre and the end of a work of fiction simultaneously. The starting or finishing point for deductive, inductive and double-focus persuasive strategies is the author/character's perspective, which focuses on how they perceive what is happening within the story. Situational and narrative ironies enhance the impact of humorous means, thus creating a persuasive discourse. The linguistic material is analyzed through a discourse approach, pragmalinguistic and linguistic-stylistic methods of research.

Keywords:

Forms of Humor; Situational/Narrative Irony; Persuasive Strategies; The Author/Character's Perspective; British Writers' Short Stories; Discourse Approachch; Persuasive Discourse

References

[1] Fox, K., 2005.Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, paperback. Hodder Paperback Publisher: London, UK. p. 432.

[2] Attardo, S., 2001. Chapter 6. Diffuse Disjunction. In: Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Mouton de Gruyter: New York, NY, USA. pp. 103–125.

[3] Knox, N., 1961.The Word IRONY and Its Context, 1500–1755. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA. p. 258.

[4] Morreall, J., 2024. Philosophy of Humor. In: Zalta, E.N., Nodelman, U. (Eds.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2024 ed. Available from: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/humor/ (cited 20 June 2025).

[5] Ermida,I., 2011. “Losers, poltroons and nudniks” in Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy: A linguistic approach to comic failure. In: Dynel, M. (Ed.). The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 335– 352.

[6] Raskin, V., 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel Publishing Company: Dordrecht, Holland. p. 284.

[7] Taylor, J.M., 2014. Linguistic Theories of Humor. In: Attardo, S. (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, 1st ed. SAGE Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.

[8] Koestler, A., 1964. The Act of Creation. Macmillan Inc.: New York, NY, USA. p. 751.

[9] Paulos, J., 1976. The Logic of Humour and the Humour in Logic. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Humour and Laughter: It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, Cardiff, UK, 13 – 17 July 1976; pp. 113–258.

[10] Colston, H.L., 2000. Chapter 1. Irony Performance and Perception: What underlies verbal, situational and other ironies? In: Athanasiadou, A., Colston, H.L. (Eds.). Irony in Language Use and Communication. (Figurative Thought and Language). John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 19–42

[11] Currie, G., 2010. Chapter 8. Irony: A Pretended Point of View. In Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, 1st ed. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK. p. 266.

[12] Easthope, A., 2005. Easthope, A. (Ed.). Englishness and national culture. Taylor & Francis: London, United Kingdom. p. 254.

[13] Alexander, R.J., 1993. Breaking Out of the Cage: English and German Verbal Humor in a Socio-semiotic Perspective. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Humor, Luxembourg, 30 September – 3 October 1993.

[14] La Fave, L., Haddad, J., Maesen, W.A., 1976. Superiority, enhanced self-esteem, and perceived incongruity humour theory. In: Chapman, A.J., Foot, H.C. (Eds.). Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications. Transaction Publishers: Piscataway, NJ, USA. pp. 63–91.

[15] Larkin-Galinanes, C. 2017. An Overview of Humor Theory. In: Attardo, S. (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, 1st ed. Routledge: New York, NY, USA. pp. 4–16.

[16] Hempelmann, C.F., 2017. Key Terms in the Field of Humor. In: Attardo, S. (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, 1st ed. Routledge: New York, NY, USA. pp. 34–48

[17] Davies, C., 2006. Nation, Social Class and Style: A Comparison of the Humour of Britain and America. Stylistyka. 15, 99–118.

[18] Chłopicki, W., 2017. Humor and Narrative. In: Attardo, S. (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, 1st ed. Routledge: London, UK. pp.143–157.

[19] Forabosco, G., 2011. Notes on humour and persuasion in advertising and legal discourse. In: Dynel, M. (Ed.). The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 353–364.

[20] Brewer W.F., 2017. Chapter 9. Literary theory, rhetoric, and stylistics: Implications for psychology. In: Spiro, Rand J., Bruce, B. C., Brewer, W.F. (Eds.). Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension. Routledge: London, United Kingdom. pp. 221−240.

[21] Dynel, M.C., 2018. Chapter 3. Deconstructing the myth of positively evaluative irony. In: Jobert M., Sorlin S. (Eds.). The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter.John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 41–58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.30?locatt=mode:legacy

[22] Copeland, R., 2014. Rhetoric and Literary Criticism. In: MacDonald, M.J. (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731596.013.028

[23] Leech, G., Short, M., 2007. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd ed. Pearson Education Limited: London, UK. p. 425.

[24] Schneider, A.-K., 2015. Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Cambridge, UK. p. 201.

[25] Mauranen, A. 1993. Cultural differences in academic discourse – problems of a linguistic and cultural minority. In: Löfman, L., Kurki-Suonio, L., Pellinen, S., et al. (Eds.). The Competent Intercultural Communicator. AFinLA: Helsinki, Finland. pp. 157–174.

[26] Ovshieva, N.L., 2016. On Culture-Specific Features of English discourse. In: Pavlovskaya, A.V. (Ed.). Russia and the West: Dialogue of Cultures: Collection of Proceedings of the XVIII International Conference. Center for the Study of Interaction of Cultures: Moscow, Russia. pp. 281–285.

[27] Hidalgo-Downing, L., 2000. Chapter 1. Basic Concepts. In Negation, Text Worlds, and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic: New York, NY, USA. p. 225.

[28] Ribó, I., 2019. Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative. Open Book Publishers: Cambridge, UK. p. 160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187

[29] Chakhachiro, R., 2009. Analysing Irony for Translation. Meta: Translators' Journal. 54(1), 32–48.

[30] Clift, R., 1999. Irony in conversation. Language in Society. 28(4), 523–553. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404599004029

[31] Simonin, O., 2018. Chapter 4. Verbal irony, politeness… and three ironic types. In: Jobert, M., Sorlin, S. (Eds.). The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 59–80.

[32] Wilson, D., 2006. The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo or pretence? Lingua. 116 (10), 1722–1743. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2006.05.001

[33] Venour, C., Ritchie, G. Mellish, C., 2011. Dimensions of incongruity in register humour. In: Dynel, M. (Ed.). The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp. 125–144

[34] Booth, W.C., 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1st ed. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, USA. p. 455.

[35] Colebrook, C., 2004. Irony (The New Critical Idiom). Routledge: New York, NY, USA. p. 224.

Downloads

How to Cite

Ovshieva, N. (2025). On Humor as a Rhetorical Strategy in English Literary Discourse. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(12), 112–132. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i12.11091

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 12 (December 2025): In progress

Article Type

Article

License

Copyright © 2025 Nalya Ovshieva

Creative Commons License

This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.