Similarities Between Romeo And Juliet

A joke is usually an idea that contains a sense of humour and usually provokes laughter. What means by humour is something that makes a person laugh or smile, ‘the quality of being funny’. (Blake, B. J. (2007), pg.1) A majority of jokes have a set-up and a punchline. (Blake, B. J. (2007), pg.3) There are various forms of jokes, such as story-type jokes, anecdote-type joke, blonde jokes, cannibal jokes and dumb jokes, etc. Jokes can be classified into verbal or written humour. Verbal humour is the kind of humour that appears in daily conversations or on the radio, videos. Written humour can appear in three main divisions: drama, prose and poetry. (Ross, A. (2005)., pg.75) In the following, I will narrow down the focus to humorous stories and jokes.

There are

The humour of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is illustrated by Mercutio in the following scenes:

‘No hare, sir, unless a hare, sir, in a Lenten pie, that is something stale and hoar ere it be spent.’ (Shakespeare, W., & Evans, G. (2003)., pg.21)

Here, Mercutio teased the Nurse by playing on words’ hare’ and ‘hoar’, Mercutio wants to express the meaning of greyish hair by the word’ hoar’, but he sounds like ‘whore’, meaning prostitute.

Written humour can also be found in Charles Dickens ‘Hard Times’.

‘The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie.’ (Kingsley, S., & Dickens, C. (2003). pg.1) This is regarded as written humour because the description of the bald man creates a sense of absurdity. Fir supposedly refers to plant while pie refers to food, it is strange to compare the appearance of the head with these two objects. The great contrast between the comparison makes this description semantically odd, thus creating a sense of