A Study on the Most Frequent Patterns in Forming Persian Jokes Based on General Theory of Verbal Humour

In the current research, an attempt has been made to investigate and analyze the content of the joke using the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) by Attardo (2020). The data of the present study includes over 400 jokes which were collected from the virtual networks and messaging applications such as Telegram and Whatsapp in a period of three months. Primarily, descriptive analysis has been applied over the collected data; then, content analysis has been run through SPSS software. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the significance of research variables, Pearson Chi-squared test was used, and Cramér's  test was used to check the correlation of between variables.The purpose of this study was to identify the most frequent patterns to make Persian jokes as well as to determine the best pattern based on laughter-inducing effects. After analyzing the data, three common patterns were identified, and after preparing a questionnaire including 30 jokes taken from each of the mentioned patterns and the participation of 125 people with various social variables such as education level, age and gender, the best pattern was identified based on laughter-inducing impact.