A joke may serve as a helpful ingredient of a foreign language class: it is able to catch the attention of the audience, to create friendly and relaxed atmosphere, moreover, it contributes to providing pithy and concise explanations of linguistic phenomena and /or illustrating them with examples easy to understand and memorise. A great number of jokes in English are based on different linguistic means on all the structural layers of the language. The article attempts to reveal the linguistic basis of a joke, to categorize them and to consider their use in a foreign language class.
The article goes on to classify eight different types of joke, with examples: phonetical, morphological, lexico-semantic (antonymy, homonymy, polysemy, paronymy, innovation), and syntactic. Recommended for the type of person who likes over-explaining jokes.
