INCONGRUITY AS A MEANS OF CREATING “BLACK HUMOR” IN THE GENRE OF STAND-UP COMEDY IN TRANSLATION (BASED ON GEORGE CARLIN’S MONOLOGUES)

Abstract

The article deals with the study of the peculiarities of reproduction incongruity as a means of creating “black humor” in the genre of stand-up comedy in translation based on the example of G. Carlin’s monologues. The relevance of the research topic lies in the insufficient study of the comic and incongruity as the mechanism of its creation, and in the insufficient attention of scientists to the work of the famous American satirist G. Carlin, whose influence on American and even world society is difficult to overestimate. The aim of the article is, therefore, to study incongruity as a mechanism for creating “black humor” in the genre of English stand-up comedy and the means of representing incongruity in translation. The study identifies the main characteristics of “black humor” as a type of the comic and describes incongruity as a mechanism for creating the comic in “black humor” and on the example of individual fragments of G. Carlin’s speeches traced the features of incongruity and its representation in Ukrainian translations. As a result, it was found that, although “black humor” is considered a “harsh” form of humor, it is social and often aims to correct the society through laughter. Authors who use “black humor” in their work resort to such forms of psychological protection of the addressee as catharsis and sublimation. The cognitive mechanism of creating the comic in “black humor” is incongruity – any kind of inconsistency with the norm, while creating a comic effect, which is the result of the interpreter’s reaction to an unexpected inconsistency with established norms of the communicative situation, including the reference situation reflected in the statement. In his speeches, G. Carlin resorted to various types of incongruity – ontological, logical and conceptual, valorative – which allows him to not only make the audience laugh, but also, through the depiction of often absurd situations, to make them think. A wide range of translation transformations is used in the reproduction of G. Carlin’s monologues, but lexical and semantic transformations and compensation play the most essential role in conveying the incongruity of “black humor”.