Humor, Pathos and Tragedy

What is Humor in Literature

• Humor is a literary tool that makes audiences laugh, or that
intends to induce amusement or laughter.
• Its purpose is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and
make the audience’s nerves relax.
• The writer uses different techniques, tools, words, and even full 
sentences in order to bring to light new and funny sides of life.
• Humor is often found in literature, theater, movies, and
advertising, where the major purpose is to make the audience
happy.
 Types of Humor
1- Incongruity or surprise

• It can be based on a surprise in the situation.

• Something unexpected happens
• this makes the reader laugh or frightened
Self-deprecating
• This is the best form of humor to target oneself to amuse people
and create a cheerful environment.
• Self-deprecating humor is when the speaker or a character makes fun
of himself or herself.
• This makes the character vulnerable to the reader,
Situational Humor

• A situation can be downright hilarious when it’s described properly. 

• The situation, whether real or imaginary.
• It means to talk about the situations whether good or bad in a
funny way.
• This is sometimes done to lessen the tension in a serious
environment too.
 Overstatement or Hyperbole

• Similarly, overstating a situation can be funny too. In this case, the

reader understands the real situation and is amused when the writer
exaggerates it.
•  It means to make something bigger or exaggerate any real or
fake events than it actually is for the sake of entertainment.
• Dying of laughter
• He is as big as elephant
Pathos

•  The appeal to emotion, means to persuade an audience by

purposely evoking certain emotions to make them feel the way the
author wants them to feel.
• Authors make deliberate word choices, use meaningful language,
and use examples and stories that evoke emotion.
• Authors can desire a range of emotional responses, including
sympathy, anger, frustration, or even amusement.
 Basic concept of Pathos
• Pathos is an appeal made to an audience’s emotions in order to evoke feeling.
• Pathos is one of the three primary modes of persuasion, along with logos and
ethos.
• Logos, or the appeal to logic, means to appeal to the audiences’ sense of reason or
logic. To use logos, the author makes clear, logical connections between ideas, and
includes the use of facts and statistics.
• Ethos is used to convey the writer’s credibility and authority. When evaluating a
piece of writing, the reader must know if the writer is qualified to comment on
this issue. The writer can communicate their authority by using credible sources;
choosing appropriate language; demonstrating that they have fairly examined the
issue
 Origins of Pathos
• Pathos is originally a Greek word meaning “suffering” or
“experience”. 
• Aristotle in his book Rhetoric, describes three primary modes of
persuasion: pathos, egos and logos.
• Plato argued that an emotional appeal could be misused to manipulate
audiences and suggested that appeals to logic or character were more
beneficial to the public discourse.
 Tragedy
• Tragedy is a genre of drama based on human suffering and,
mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main
character.
• Tragedy is a genre of story in which a hero is brought
down by his/her own flaws, usually by ordinary human
flaws – flaws like greed, over-ambition, or even an
excess of love, honor, or loyalty.
• In any tragedy, we start with the tragic hero, usually in
his prime. The hero is successful, respected, and happy.
But he has some tragic flaw that will ultimately cause
his downfall.
 Features of tragedy
• Tragedies should take place around a noble and powerful
figure.
• Tragedies should provide some catharsis to the viewer,
meaning that it should generate emotion while providing an
outlet for said emotions.
• Catharsis is the purification and purgation of emotions through
dramatic art, or it may be any extreme emotional state that
results in renewal and restoration
• Tragic flaw
• Anagnorisis (Recognition of truth)