The teaching of humor in the Spanish classroom for foreigners through the linguistic joke

Abstract

In this article we will try to show five humorous signs used in Spanish linguistic jokes and that could be used in Spanish teaching. These signs are polysemy, homophony, paronymy, phraseology and diminutives. The election of jokes as a structure to use in teaching is based not only in the fact that it is the main humorous structure, but also in its easy to learn structure. As Attardo (2008) said, joke is the easiest humorous text type. Also, “joke is a humorous unit with no context and selfcontained, which has all the required information to be understood and enjoyed” (Martin, 2008: 37). The goal of this paper is to show how previously mentioned signs work in an internet extracted corpus, so we can get generalizations that can be used in Spanish teaching.