BETWEEN IRONY AND FOLK WIT: SATIRICAL STRATEGIES IN O. HENRY'S AND GAFUR GULOM'S SHORT STORIES

This article investigates the divergent satirical strategies employed by the American short-story writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910) and the Uzbek writer Gafur Gulom (1903–1966), focusing on the distinction between structural irony and folk wit as two culturally rooted mechanisms of comic social criticism. Drawing on satire theory (Highet, 1962; Griffin, 1994; Test, 1991) and on theories of carnivalesque folk humor (Bakhtin, 1968), the article argues that O. Henry's satire is organized around the reversing trick ending and a detached, ironic narratorial voice, while Gulom's satire is organized around the oral anecdote tradition associated with the trickster-fool Nasreddin Afandi, in which comic effect accumulates through dialogue, repetition, and self-incrimination. Close reading of representative stories from both authors reveals that, despite their different mechanisms, both writers direct laughter toward the correction of recognizable social vices — poverty, greed, vanity, bureaucratic hypocrisy — while adapting their comic techniques to the literary economies and censorship conditions of their respective societies. The article concludes that irony and folk wit should be understood not as opposed genres but as two historically distinct branches of a single satirical impulse.