Conversational English and Campus Comedy: A Linguistic and Sociocultural Study of Humour in Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone

Abstract

This paper studies the function of conversational English and linguistic humour in Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT! through stylistic, pragmatic, and sociocultural approaches. It argues that the novel’s informal narrative manner is not simply a marker of popular readability but a purposeful literary device. Bhagat’s use of student slang, Hinglish, exaggerated imagery, and self-mocking humour constructs a comic mode through which academic anxiety, institutional discipline, and fear of failure are reimagined in more manageable terms. By drawing on humour theories such as incongruity and relief, and on pragmatic concepts including Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, this paper shows how humour becomes a strategy of survival in the highly pressurized environment of IIT. The analysis further suggests that Bhagat’s conversational idiom reflects the lived sociolinguistic reality of urban Indian youth and broadens the reach of Indian English fiction by moving away from elitist literary codes. At the same time, the paper also acknowledges the limits of this comic world, especially its male-centered perspective and the restricted agency granted to female characters. Ultimately, the essay contends that the humour of Five Point Someone works at once as entertainment, social criticism, and a linguistic record of contemporary campus life in India.