Humor is as interesting as it is hard to define. It has travelled a long way since Hippokratestheory about body fluids and how someone, if lacking one of these, were called a humorist andwere laughed at.In this thesis we developed a new method for categorizing types of humor in Swedish comedyseries on TV. We chose six different shows (Grotesco, KvarteretSkatan, Morgonsoffan, Fredaghelaveckan, Parlamentet and Hjälp!) from the two most popular TV-channels in Sweden(SVT1 & TV4).We based or method on previous researchers’ work and came to find some categories that wererepresented in most of the previous work. Our own method came to contain seven categorieswhich we believe is enough to obtain all kinds of humor in Swedish comedy series on TV.In our study we saw that most of the humor fell under the category that we called unnormalityhumor,a category which contained incongruity which many researchers believe is afundamental part of humor.Our opinion is that the unnormality-category became too wide in our study and that we perhapsshould have divided it into two or possibly three categories to see a more distinctive result.Nonetheless, our result offers an interesting starting point for future comparative studiesfocusing on similar subjects.

<p>Humor is as interesting as it is hard to define. It has travelled a long way since Hippokratestheory about body fluids and how someone, if lacking one of these, were called a humorist andwere laughed at.In this thesis we developed a new method for categorizing types of humor in Swedish comedyseries on TV. We chose six different shows (Grotesco, KvarteretSkatan, Morgonsoffan, Fredaghelaveckan, Parlamentet and Hjälp!) from the two most popular TV-channels in Sweden(SVT1 & TV4).We based or method on previous researchers’ work and came to find some categories that wererepresented in most of the previous work. Our own method came to contain seven categorieswhich we believe is enough to obtain all kinds of humor in Swedish comedy series on TV.In our study we saw that most of the humor fell under the category that we called unnormalityhumor,a category which contained incongruity which many researchers believe is afundamental part of humor.Our opinion is that the unnormality-category became too wide in our study and that we perhapsshould have divided it into two or possibly three categories to see a more distinctive result.Nonetheless, our result offers an interesting starting point for future comparative studiesfocusing on similar subjects.</p>