Puns as Sources for Humor and Laughter

Humor and laughter are among the reactions people give in their daily lives. All people naturally participate in humorous speech and behavior. Therefore, humor represents one of the main aspects of everyday interactions. Consequently, 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. One of the reasons that humor has come out as a theatrical form is the pleasure people take in laughing. Punning is one of the categories which are the source for laughter. Puns can be defined shortly as the use of words in a way that suggests two or more meanings which are usually incompatible and thus the creation of humorous effect. In this study, the puns collected from the specialized authentic corpus which is built from the transcriptions of the video recordings of the television show Komedi Dükkanı ‘Comedy Shop’ are analyzed. The instances used in Komedi Dükkanı ‘Comedy Shop’, which has a different structure from other humor genres like stand-up and sitcoms and thereby is defined as a new humor genre, are categorized and the differences in terms of genre are presented.