An Analysis Of Conversational Humor Strategies In Friends—from A Gender Perspective

Nowadays, the study of gender differences in language has become an important topic in the field of sociolinguistics. The focus of some previous studies was mainly on the form of language, such as pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax. As the research progresses, the concentration has shifted to the differentiation on conversational strategies, discourse style, etc. As for the language and gender studies in China, detailed studies have witnessed a short history since the West had already come out with certain statistics. Moreover, most of the data selected by scholars from home and abroad belong to ordinary interaction, chat in internet, speech in judicial setting and so forth. There is little attention on TV serials, especially to sitcom.This thesis concentrates on conversational humor and gender study and adopts the scripts of a famous American sitcom Friends as data. With the analysis of the strategies in conversational humor, the thesis aims to explore the situations of strategies in conversational humor used by male and female friends in same gender and mixed gender groups. The methodology is the combination of qualitatively and quantitatively method. The produced data are categorized with framework of three strategies: solidarity based, aggression based and psychological based strategy and their features of each strategy. In the end, according to results of the data, a trend of using different strategies and their features by male and female is discussed in this thesis. The study shows that on the whole, males are very active in making fun in both same gender and mixed gender groups. To achieve solidarity, males prefer highlighting similarities in mixed gender group and sharing in single gender group. They tease to offend others and to save faces. However, females like maintaining boundaries to seek conformity when males are present, while adopt strategies of highlighting similarities in single gender groups.In the end, the thesis also gives reasonable explanations to the phenomenon with unique social, cultural and psychological factors, and concrete implications and suggestions are proposed.