A Relevance-Theoretical Approach To Humor In American Situation Comedy "Friends"

Humor is a pervasive human phenomenon, observable in many aspects of life. It is such a kind of popular genre that within the study of witty remarks, striking ending and further more, humor in speech and genres has attracted scholars throughout the ages. Humor has been studied from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint that includes fields like linguistics, rhetorics, aesthetics, philosophy, and sociology, etc and the study of humor can be traced back to the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Freud (1856-1939).A situation comedy or"sitcom"is a genre of comedy performance, or to say, a verbal-visual model of communication originally devised for radio but today typically found on television. Sitcoms usually consist of recurring characters in a format in which there are one or more humorous story lines centered around a common environment, such as a family home or workplace. The humor in sitcom has its own characteristics.Although humor has received enough attention as a whole, the study of humor in situation comedy is still a new topic in the research world and the linguistic researches on humor in sitcom are still limited within the field of discourse analysis, foreign language teaching, cross-cultural study, etc. There is, for example,"Learning Colloquial Expression: Situation Comedy as a New Resource"by Xu Shan (2004);"How to Make Laugh: The Study and Analysis on Create Skill & Comedy Effect of Chinese Sitcom"by Chen Fang (2005);"A Discourse Approach to Humor in American Situation Comedy Friends"by Zhou Xiaoli (2005), etc.The present thesis offers a new perspective—relevance theory—to the study of humor in situation comedy. The author takes both the transcript version and the video version of American sitcom"Friends"as the data sources, and collects altogether 45 humorous exchanges from Volume 11 to Volume 23 of the first season of"Friends"for the classification and analysis of the humor in"Friends", taking the laughter in the background of the show as the indicator of humor. This thesis mainly takes descriptive methods of data analysis and deals with the following three research questions. Firstly, how can we classify the major kinds of humor in sitcom"Friends"according to the different humorous strategies being used in it? Based on the examination of the 45 humor samples picked at random from Volume 11 to Volume 23 of the first season of"Friends", according to the different humorous strategies, we could classify the humor in sitcom"Friends"into two main categories—verbal humor and non-verbal humor which are further classified into several subcategories. Within the category of verbal humor, there is humor made by the deviation of linguistic structure, by punning, by playing with polysemy, by the ambiguity, by the deformation of encyclopedic knowledge and by violations of logic; while within the category of non-verbal humor, there are humor made with paralanguage (rate of speech, non-verbal sounds), and visual information. And these different kinds of humor are analyzed within the framework of RT. Secondly, how can we explain the come-about of humor in the specific context—situation comedy within the framework of relevance theory? To deal with this question, a relevance-theoretical analysis of the come-about of humorous effect in the humor samples taken from sitcom"Friends"is offered. As the author suggests, humorous discourses in situation comedy involve specific interpretive paths favored by the retrieval from the context of assumptions related to the humorist (humor writer)'s communicative strategies. Within a RT framework, the audience interprets utterances, assuming that a set of assumptions ostensively communicated provides a good balance of cognitive effects in exchange for the effort which their processing demands, and that this set of assumptions is the one that the humorist presumably intended to communicate. If the utterance is not as informative as required, irrelevant, untrue, etc, a search for a more relevant interpretation worth being processed may be activated, despite the supplementary mental effort required. The reward of this extra effort in processing is a pleasant surprise and laughter. In the whole process, there is one characteristic that is unique to the case of situation comedy, which is that while interpreting the humorous exchanges in sitcoms, the audiences always hold a series of sitcom-specific contextual assumptions besides some other relevant assumptions because of the unique character of the genre of comedy performance. Thirdly, how do we explain the reason of humor appreciation failure in a cross-cultural context? Sperber and Wilson (1995) argue that a mismatch between the context envisaged by the speaker and the one actually used by the hearer may result in an interpretation failure in communications. In cross-cultural communications, sometimes it is hard to ensure a shared set of contextual assumptions because people coming from different cultures usually possess different living patterns, customs, habits, rites and rituals, language, social organization, worldview, value, belief, patterns of thinking, so on and so forth. So, because of the inaccessibility of certain culture-specific contextual assumptions due to the great differences between Chinese culture and American culture, we as Chinese audiences sometimes cannot select the right interpretation intended by the American humorist so that we cannot get the pleasant surprise which is the direct psychological stimulus for laughter and consequently, fail to get the humor the humorist intends to convey.The present study of humor in sitcom has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, as we can see from the literature review, although a relevance-theoretical explanation of the cognitive mechanism of humor has been proposed for a few years, this generalized theoretical explanation of the cognitive mechanism of humor is seldom utilized in the analysis of a specific humor context and has seldom been testified. So by applying the relevance-theoretical explanation of the cognitive mechanism of humor to the specific context—situation comedy, the corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed. And in the current thesis, we will try to present a classification of the various kinds of humor in sitcom"Friends", which has not been tried before. The classification of the humor in sitcom"Friends"can set a good example for the classification of humor in situation comedy—a verbal-visual model of communication—as a whole so that can to some extent make certain complementation to the theories of humor and situation comedy. The third theoretical significance is that the thesis provides a relevance-theoretical analysis of the reason of humor appreciation failure in a cross-cultural context so that it will further extend the boundary of applicability of relevance theory to the arena of cross-cultural communication. Practically, the study of the present thesis can be applicable to foreign language teaching and learning.