The Relationship between Komedi Dükkânı ‘Comedy Shop’ and Ortaoyunu in the Level of Laughter and a Comparison in the Sense of Linguistic Humor (Verbal Humor)

Humor represents a central aspect of everyday conversations. Therefore, the issues like the reasons of laughter and what constitutes humor have been questioned since Plato and Aristotle and humor has become a field that has been developing continuously ever since. The pleasure people take in laughing is one of the reasons that humor has come out as a theatrical form. Comedy has gained the place as a popular genre in both pre-Republic and post-Republic periods. Including the humorous elements and local properties, the Ortaoyunu (literally ‘performance in the middle’) is one of the major types of traditional Turkish theatre but at the present time it has disappeared. Nonetheless, some properties of the Ortaoyunu manifest itself in comedy works formed afterwards. One of the prominent examples for this is the television program called Komedi Dükkânı ‘Comedy Shop’. There are relations and similarities between the Ortaoyunu and Komedi Dükkânı in terms of their characters, improvisatory structures, decor-costume conceptions, comic elements in movements, creating situation comedy and linguistic properties of humor (verbal humor). In this study, the main theories of humor are reviewed briefly and the similarities between the Ortaoyunu and Komedi Dükkânı are dealt with by sketching the characteristics. In addition, the Ortaoyunu and Komedi Dükkânı are compared in the frame of linguistic humor (verbal humor), puns, ambiguities and impoliteness strategies. In general, based on these relations and similarities between the Ortaoyunu and Komedi Dükkânı, the paper looks for an answer to the question whether Komedi Dükkânı is a modern form of the Ortaoyunu.