Zaytung as an Alternative Discoursive Area of Political Humour and Public Opposition

This article explores the laughing-based critical space created by the news parodies in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue and carnival through the examples from news parody site Zaytung. Satirical news parodies, a subtype of political humor, create an alternative critical space based on laughter by parodying politics and traditional journalism. By doing so, they perform a kind of intervention in the sovereign discourse with a two-way operation, as well as a new discourse. Emerging laughter makes the absurdity behind the dominant discourses visible and brings these discourses to a negotiable closeness. In the article, firstly, the concepts of dialogue, carnival/carnivalesque, parody and satire will be clarified, and then how Zaytung reverses the dominant discourses on the dialogical and carnival axes will be analyzed