An Analysis of the Humour Present in Political Discourse

Humour can be considered to be a technique in social interaction that is used to build camaraderie. Arguably, creating solidarity through the medium of humour can also involve strands of humour where the amusement and... [ view full abstract ]

Humour can be considered to be a technique in social interaction that is used to build camaraderie. Arguably, creating solidarity through the medium of humour can also involve strands of humour where the amusement and subsequent feelings of unified identities is derived from humour that mocks or laughs at those considered to be on the other side. Politics, whilst being an innately serious topic, can still be considered to be connected to humour. On the one hand, joke writes are frequently employed to political speeches as a means to engage with the audience as humour helps with social cohesion and projects positive identity traits. Likewise, political satire has long existed as a medium of filtering through political discourses into the public consciousness. Consequently, it is interesting to consider the use of humour in an explicitly political situation such as Prime Minister’s Questions as this study does, using data taken from the summer of 2017. This is a series of dialogues revolving around the Prime Minister being asked serious political questions in the UK Parliament. The interactions are not entirely scripted but they are formulaic in structure. As such while it is different from natural everyday speech, it does also contain elements of natural speech. Even in such a serious situation, people still chose to add in humorous utterances when they are not strictly speaking necessary, which can be considered to be either planned or spontaneous. This indicates that humour can be argued to serve a rather unique and important linguistic purpose in human interaction.These utterances can be categorised into more general uses of humour as a device to facilitate communication as well as examples where humour is used to separate the house into groups often along party political lines, where people either identify with the side making the joke or the side being on the receiving end of the joke in line with their pre-existing identities.