Lobova O. British and American Standup-Comedy as a Genre of Comic Institutional Discourse

Subject of inquiry is standup-comedy which is considered to be the dominant genre of modern English comic institutional discourse. Aim of the research is in revealing means of instantiation of categories of comic institutional discourse based on genre of standup-comedy and in establishing its functional characteristics. Methods of: discourse typological analysis, the method of discursive interpretation, the method of intent analysis, the method of text interpretation, the method of cognitive modeling, the method of stylistic analysis, the method of intertextual analysis, the methods of quantitative and statistic data analysis. Theoretical and practical results: the status of comic institutional discourse in modern English linguocultural area is defined; fundamental features of comic institutional discourse are elucidated; the specificity of categories and functions of the given discourse is revealed; lingual means that create comic effect in standup comedians’ jokes are established; complex analysis of genre of standup comedy is carried out. Novelty: the chief genre of standup-comedy in English comic institutional discourse is validated; mechanisms of incongruity and explicit or implicit reversivity are defined as basic features of standup-comedy; the nature of means of representation of the main characteristics of cognitive categories (coherence, intertextuality, informativity), communicative categories (addressness, modality, intentionality) and metadiscursive category (theatricality) of comic institutional discourse is found out; functions of comic institutional discourse are singled out according to communicative aim of addresser (to criticize, ridicule, reflect social aspects of life of English society). Field of application: implementation of the research results in lectures on stylistics of the English language, discourse analysis and text interpretation, country studies, theoretical grammar of the English language.