A survey on the Prose humor in some of the Persian Official Humor Press

In this paper, a survey on prose humor in the Persian official press on humor has been done. The research data includes 260 prose texts taken from 7 humor journals which have been published in the recent 25 years (1363-1388) in Iran. The data has been examined and analyzed within the General Theory of Verbal Humor framework. The General Theory of Verbal Humor, which nowadays is one of the well-known linguistic theories applied to humorous studies, was presented by Raskin and Attardo in 1991. In this theory, the humorous texts are analyzed on the basis of six basic variables or knowledge resources, including script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and language. The results of this study reveal that the presented framework is applicable to the Persian humorous press texts and among the six mentioned basic variables, script opposition and logical mechanism are the ones which are of the most importance in Persian, because they can be found in all of the examined texts. Therefore, it is concluded that these two variables are the effective factors in forming the structure of the prose humor in Persian. The results of the other variables have been presented in the “conclusion part” or the final section of the study.