Modern Humorous Discourse on the Example of Stand-Up Comedy

Humor plays a big role in everyone's life, as it is a way to simplify communication on a psychological level. In addition to its communicative functions, humor also performs entertaining ones. Nowadays, stand-up comedy has become one of the main entertaining humorous genres. This thesis is mainly devoted to describing the linguistic and textual features of stand-up comedy and provides an overview of their differences in the three identified formats. The methods of both discursive analysis and stylistic and compositional analysis are described and applied. The study also provides a review of the literature on the rhetoric of stage performance, on the peculiarities of oral and stage speech, as well as the speech of humor. Most of the works devoted to humor, stand-up comedy and oral performances from the stage focus on prosodic, psychological and individual aspects of speech production. The main purpose of this thesis is to describe and compare the stylistic, linguistic, compositional and discursive features of modern stand-up comedy using the example of three main formats of its implementation. Descriptive, quantitative, qualitative and discursive analysis are used as methods.