Innovation in Language Learning

This paper investigates discourse analysis and its role in studying comic words and their meaning in different contexts. The importance of this study is devoted to the connection between discourse and comedy or humor, the difference between comedy, mocking, teasing, and sarcasm. The significance of this study is also emphasized by the two kinds of interjections, onomatopoetic words, mocking, teasing, and sarcasm serve as kinds or types of comic words in American and British sitcoms. This study aims at showing the relation between discourse analysis and comedy or comic words, presenting the types of comedy and comic words and how they give the meaning of mocking, teasing and sarcasm, presenting the difference between mocking, teasing and sarcasm, displaying interjections and their relation with comic words, in addition to analyzing the data in terms of tables. It is hypothesized that many people do not know the meaning of discourse analysis and comedy. Second, they do not have the capacity to differentiate between comedy, mocking, sarcasm and teasing. They also do not know how to use comic words in expressions. Above all, many of them cannot analyze a particular episode properly and people cannot know the intentions of the speaker concerning comic words. The value of this study is for people who are interested in linguistics. The data used in this study are the American sitcom friends and the British one which is bottom. The theory used for analyzing data is the Cooperative Principle and Taflinger model. There are many questions concerning this study, for instance, is comedy considered as a type of discourse? How many main types of comedy and are they considered as types of comic words?  Is there any relation between comedy and discourse? What are comic words and their types? What is the relation between comedy, mocking, teasing and sarcasm? Is there any relation between interjections and comic words? The results of “Friends”, the American sitcom and “Bottom”, the British one, show that there are many comic words. The characters use interjections or onomatopoeia to communicate laughter and excitement. The use of teasing is also emphasized by the use of other comic words like: a*s, breasts, and idiot for presenting jokes and laughter sense. In addition to the use of sarcasm to display humorous sense as “precious” for implying opposite meaning in order to amuse the hearers. Moreover, there is a sense of denoting mockery by the use of “b*****s” to make fun of a specific character.

Keywords: discourse analysis, comedy, mocking, teasing, sarcasm, interjections, onomatopoetic words;