Political Satire in Pakistani English Newspapers: ACorpus- BasedAnalysis of Humor and Criticism in Editorials (2020– 2024)

Abstract

This study examines the use of political satire and critical discourse in Pakistani English newspaper editorials through a qualitative corpus-based analysis grounded in Incongruity Theory and Gee's Discourse Analysis framework. The corpus consists of 300 editorials (152,815 words) from four leading newspapers: Dawn, The News International, The Express Tribune, and Pakistan Today. Concordance and collocational patterns of twelve high-frequency political keywords-government, state, military, court, election, corruption, political, Sharif, accountability, economy, power, and army-were studied for recurring satirical strategies. The study draws on Incongruity Theory of Humor (Kant; Morreall, 2009) and James Paul Gee’s Discourse Analysis Framework (Gee, 2011) to interpret how satire functions through rhetorical devices such as irony, sarcasm, parody, hyperbole, metaphor, and ridicule. Using concordance lines generated through AntConc, the analysis identifies recurring rhetorical strategies, including irony, exaggeration, metaphor, and evaluative framing, which expose contradictions within political and institutional practices. Gee's notions of situated meaning and Big "D" Discourse are applied to demonstrate how these lexical items acquire context-specific meanings and contribute to broader ideological narratives. At the situated level, institutions are depicted as coercive, inefficient, or selectively accountable, while political actors are constructed through shifting public personas and elite dominance. At the macro level, the editorials collectively reproduce a discourse of democratic fragility, civil-military imbalance, and public mistrust in governance structures. The findings suggest that political satire in Pakistani English editorials functions not merely as humor but as a critical discursive mechanism that challenges institutional authority and highlights systemic failures. By integrating corpus linguistics with discourse and humor theory, this study contributes to understanding how media discourse shapes public perceptions of power, legitimacy, and democratic practice in Pakistan.