This study investigates the functioning of language play as a mechanism for generating comic effects in Russian television humor, with a particular focus on two prominent shows, Ural Dumplings and Comedy Club. Drawing on a representative corpus of 50 episodes (25 from each program), the research seeks to identify, describe, and classify various types of language play occurring in humorous dialogues, replicas, and sketches. Special attention is devoted to genre-specific distinctions, strategies of audience involvement, and the sociocultural roles of humor, including integration, socialization, critical reflection, and provocation. The methodological framework combines discourse and pragmalinguistic analysis with content analysis and semantico-pragmatic interpretation, implemented within a comparative approach. The scientific novelty of the work lies in developing a comprehensive typology of language play in small stage forms and applying it to the comparative study of television comedy. For the first time, on the basis of an empirically constructed corpus, the linguistic and pragmatic features of comic discourse are contrasted across two genre-different formats. The findings demonstrate that Ural Dumplings predominantly employ phonetic-semantic and culturally marked games, creating the effect of “folk” humor and strengthening collective identity, whereas Comedy Club relies on pragmatic and interdiscursive strategies, constructing intellectually saturated humor oriented toward individual perception and critical reception. The conclusions emphasize the role of genre, media platform, and communicative interaction with the audience in shaping the comic effect. The study thereby broadens the perspectives of media linguistics and humor theory, while providing an empirical foundation for subsequent interdisciplinary investigations of humorous discourse.
Yong Tian (Mon,) studied this question.