Anatomy of Laughter: A Structuralist Poetics of Parodic Deviation in Rich Orloff's Oedi and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

The pivotal question this study seeks to answer is: how is laughter achieved through textual and structural manipulation? A structuralist view posits that laughter as a cultural and literary phenomenon rests upon an underlying formal matrix, or as dubbed after Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic model, the langue. There must exist a generative set of structural rules, codes, and compositional formulas for producing comedy, provided one masters the finite set of elements, relational transformations, and syntactic deviations from established genres. As literary structures reveal their formal mechanics more radiantly when examined in contrast to their structural opposites, this study scrutinizes Rich Orloff's one-act comedy Oedi in contrast to its canonical tragic precursor, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. The classical tragedy serves as the origin, background, intertextual horizon, and structural antithesis for Orloff's parody. By employing structuralist theories of narrative grammar, genre codes, and intertextual skewing, this study isolates four generative rules of comic transformation: (۱) The shift from public/cosmic totality to domestic/private triviality, (۲) The expansion of open potentiality against tragic determinacy, (۳) The strategic deployment of anachronistic incongruity against classical decorum (preptron), and (۴) The deliberate subversion of horizon of expectations.

کلیدواژه ها:

Structuralism ، Comic Deviation ، Oedi ، Genre Transformation ، Anachronism