Humor analysis in two selected short stories of Mark Twain: Adam’s Diary and Eve’s Diary

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on analyzing the humor forms deeply in two selected Mark Twain’s short stories, Adam’s Diary and Eve’s Diary. Humor in general plays an important part in establishing who people are and how they think about themselves, as a result of how they interact with others.

Based on the background of the study above, the research problems of this thesis are: first is what the forms of humor in both Adam’s Diary and Eve’s Diary are. The second is what the functions of humor in both short stories are. Hence this research is categorized in style and tone as intrinsic elements, which is humor.

This research is categorized as literary criticism since the researcher conduct the interpretation and analysis on a literary work. The researcher uses objective approach in doing the analysis as in this analysis is only focuses on the literary work itself, therefore this research is uses an intrinsic method, which attempt to analyse mood and tone, that is humor.

After analysing the data, the researcher found that there are three forms of humor in both short stories, which are superiority, incongruity, and relief. For the function of the form of humor, the researcher found that there are four functions, identification, clarification, differentiation, and enforcement. Meanwhile, this research is consisting of two short stories, so after answering the research problem, the researcher tries to compare both the result related to the both stories.

Thus, this research may give benefit especially on analysing humor aspect in the literary work. Finally, the researcher suggest for further researcher should present more detail about the humor analyses and its types by preparing more data collected and understanding more theories related.