Dichotomies of a comic text analysis

The article deals with the poetics of the comic, the main focus is on the categories of analysis of individual comic segments. The material for the study was the prose of Nikolai Gogol. According to scientific literature, a comic work can be described not only as an aesthetic phenomenon but also as a cognitive construction and a special symbolic practice, which makes it possible to differentiate comic elements according to various criteria. A close reading of a comic fragment shows that a relatively small amount of text can contain many comic components, between which structural, content, and pragmatic differences can be detected. The comic text is considered through the prism of a set of dichotomies: active laughter - reduced laughter, satire - humor, comic deviation - nonsense, a simple comic element - a complex comic element. As shows an analysis of examples of reduced laughter (the term coined by M. M. Bakhtin), reduction of the comic is often associated with the loss (or incomplete realization) in the segment of special interdiscursivity. Grasping the dichotomy of satire and humor requires taking into account the diversity of intentions realized in satire: it can not only ridicule anomalous objects but also destroy the norm itself. Among the anomalies underlying the comic game, it is possible to distinguish deviations (shifts from the norm) and nonsense. A comic text based on nonsense requires special interpretive scenarios (scripts), in particular, it is proposed to distinguish between nonsense as such and absurdity. Distinguishing comic routines that are complex (in terms of their structure of expression) significantly complicates the issue of quantitative analysis of the comic: the volume of comic segments and the volume of comic effects are not fundamentally equivalent.