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The dialogues were some of the materials created for the learning of foreign languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They included all those linguistic elements that the foreign student of Spanish had to learn, among them the knowledge of idiomatic sentences and the humor that, from its use, may appear. It is based on the hypothesis that verbal humor can be a learning element for foreign students. It is conceived as a discursive strategy that can be admitted in some textual types although these can not be characterized as humoristic. The objective of this paper is to analyze the linguistic form and the pragmatic implication of humor as an integral element of this textual type. To this end, a work corpus of 23 phraseological statements has been established. Both their forms and their meanings have been analyzed, as well as their possibilities of activating the humorous component in the dialogues. The result obtained is the confirmation of the starting hypothesis and the achievement of the formulated objectives: idiomatic sentences can be indicators of the appearance of humor in this textual type; they are integrated into the discursive strategy in which cultural aspects of the society that produces them are inserted and displayed, and for this reason they should be studied by the Spanish language learner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]