Humor during Crisis; an Examination over Humor related to covid-19 disease based on General Theory of Verbal Humor

Rudaki is one of the poets whose poetry collection has not been found and the The present paper has been written to examine the jokes about the outbreak of Covid-19 which have been circulated in the social media. Linguistic and discoursal analysis of these types of jokes which are sociolinguistically called "disaster jokes", could contribute to elaborating different aspects of this social phenomenon as a means to show the public culture in the socio-cultural framework of the society. The data of the present paper includes over 100 Covid-19 related jokes which have been collected from the virtual networks and some applications such as telegram and whatsapp within 90days from February to May 2020 made and circulated in Iran. The present data in this paper have been analysed and examined based on general theory of verbal humour and xi2 test. Having examined the existing data in this paper, the authors found a meaningful relationship between "Logical Mechanism" and "Script Opposition" as two main knowledge sources. Furthermore, examining the present data depicts that the political, religion, critical and sexual issues have been linked to these jokes to form humour and irony; accordingly, these jokes can be classified under political, religious, sexual, ethic and neutral categories. In addition, a meaningful relationship between these jokes and script opposition can be taken into consideration.