LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF BRITISH AND RUSSIAN STANDUP PERFORMANCES: CROSS-CULTURAL CONTRASTIVE STUDY

Humour has a unique ability to unite people, it helps us to look at circumstances from a different angle, brings people together. However, it becomes a torture in cross-cultural communication, as it requires cultural and linguistic fluency in its comprehension. Our study compares humour in Russia and the UK, which is vividly represented in standup comedies that become more and more popular with the audience. By examining the process and ways comedians affect the audience using gesticulation and figurative language we have come to the conclusion that despite obvious cultural and linguistic differences, preferences in topics we can single out a certain degree of deviation in both cultures from "a control type" in cross-cultural comic space. Key characteristics of standup performances were identified under analysis: urgency of the topic, national color, special ways of achieving a comic effect, including the use of stylistic devices (hyperbole, repetition), colloquialisms, vulgarisms, bathos, non-verbal language (gestures, pauses), discourse markers. Our research was based on the rating assessment tool that allowed us to prove null hypothesis - the degree of deviation in Russian stand up is higher than in British stand up.