LAUGHTER WITH A PURPOSE: SOCIAL CRITICISM THROUGH SATIRICAL NARRATIVE IN O. HENRY AND GAFUR GULOM
Keywords:
By comparing their narrative strategies, their preferred targets of criticism, and the worldviews underlying their humor,Abstract
Satire occupies a distinctive place in world literature as a mode that fuses entertainment with ethical and social judgment. Long before printed literature existed, oral traditions across cultures relied on comic exaggeration, irony, and mockery to expose vice, folly, and injustice, while sparing audiences the bitterness of direct accusation. This paper examines how two writers from radically different cultural and historical contexts — the American short-story master William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry (1862–1910), and the Uzbek poet and prose writer Gafur Gulom (1903–1966) — employed satirical narrative as an instrument of social criticism. Although separated by geography, language, and ideological environment, both authors share a fundamental conviction: laughter, when carefully constructed, can reveal truths that direct polemic cannot.
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