Why is there a place for humour when a heart breaks?

This article is devoted to the problematic area of humour in a story with an essentially serious plot. The author analyzes the text of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close written by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is known as a description of a life-after-tragedy experience. The main goal of the paper is to understand why the author uses humour in such a story. The methodology of the study is rather complex; such methods as the continuous sampling method and the quantitative method, as well as methods of semantic and pragmatic analyses based on the Semantic-Script Theory of Humour and General Theory of Verbal Humour are used. The term “humour” is applied as a generic term. The author defines 177 extracts with a humorous effect and distributes them according to two communicative situations (author/reader and character/character). The main functions of humour in the novel are to describe a character, to make a contact/to capture attention, to cope with a problem, to add an aesthetic value, to arouse an interest, to humiliate, etc. The distribution of the extracts with a humorous effect provides the possibility to illustrate the humour melody of the novel and show the general development from humour to seriousness. The re- sults could be helpful to analyze the author’s idiostyle, to better understand some linguo-cultural nuances, as well as for translation studies.