A humor a vallásos szövegek nyelvében
Humour in Religious Discourse

Author(s): Tamara Hardi-Magyar
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, Theology and Religion
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: religious language use; pragmatics of humour; speech acts; Jewish and Christian humorous narratives; ecclesiastical communication;
Summary/Abstract: The study examines the role of humour within the little-researched domain of religious language use, drawing on examples from several denominations (Jewish, Protestant, Catholic). Its aim is to explore the linguistic functioning of humour on multiple levels—lexico-semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and stylistic—with particular attention to ecclesiastical communications and everyday religious discourse. The analysis relies on both written and oral sources (anecdotes, jokes, ecclesiastical utterances, papal examples) and posits that humour in religious communities is not an exception but a recurrent communicative resource. From a pragmatic perspective, the author analyses how speech-act categories (directives, interrogatives/rogatives, commissives/promissives, performatives) operate: how they create the preconditions for a punchline, trigger perlocutionary effects, and shape the participants’ mutual positioning. The findings align with Attardo’s well-known observation that “the most obvious function of humour is to create solidarity among the participants”; across the corpora examined, this function supports understanding and dialogue across denominational boundaries. The study concludes that humour is an integral part of religious language use: simultaneously didactic, relationship-building, and conflict-mitigating. Consequently, further corpus-based comparative research is warranted from both linguistic and theological perspectives.

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