The paper explores the linguistic devices that the famous Soviet satirist Mikhail M. Zoshchenko employed in his short stories to achieve a humorous effect. As the Incongruity Theory of Humor states, the cause of laughter is the perception of something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. Zoshchenko’s texts abide – putting on display violations on all levels of language: morphological, syntactic and semantic coercion, discourse garden paths, forced presuppositions and unconventional implicatures.