The Linguistic and Cultural Characteristics of the Japanese Humor in Dialectal Texts

In the studies of Western scholars on the theme of Japanese humor, misunderstandings and prejudices often arise, connected to the fact that the culture, mentality, and language of the aforementioned country are different from that of the European countries which are more habitual to us Japanese humor possesses a lot of unique features; the most distinctive one being the extensive dispersion of the language games or the so-called puns. However, there are not so many pieces that would examine this kind of jokes from the point of comic linguistic cognitive theory. Moreover, there is no exact answer to the question of whether there is a direct dependence of the differences in humor on regions and dialects or not. The purpose of this study is to find a pre-existing single template among Japanese language jokes, which does not depend on the dialectal aspects of the Tokyo and Kansai regions of Japan. In this paper, quantitative and qualitative approaches are used to collect materials for further classification and analysis.