Black Comedy and Discourse Analysis: Unveiling Political Tendencies in Bassem Youssef’s Second Interview with Piers Morgan

For decades the Arab-Israel conflict has been the subject talk of all news and media platforms. On the 7th of October, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel capturing almost 250 hostages. This serious event has made headlines and has become a remarkable subject for politicians, news analysts and interviewers. Bassem Yousef, an Egyptian comedian famous for his sarcastic handling of serious political issues, conducted his second interview with Piers Morgan, an English broadcaster and media personality, on the 2nd of November 2023. In order to investigate how black comedy serves as a critical tool for political expression and how Youssef’s comedic approach reflects and challenges political power structures, a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis is conducted, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to decide the linguistic tools employed to figure out the political satirical tendencies. Hallliday’s (2014) SFL is adopted as the theoretical framework of the present study and the Transitivity Processes, which include material, relational, mental, verbal, existential, and behavioral, are applied to the excerpts extracted from the interview. The study concludes that language is definitely a means of highlighting the political tendencies implicitly conveyed by humorous, ironical and satirical tones. The study proposes a type of discourse analysis, which is ignored in the literature, referred to as Humorous Discourse Analysis.