Face And Humor-Astudy Of Humor In Zhao Benshan's Comic Sketches

A comic sketch refers to the short and concise comedy which employs humor, satire, funniness to reflect the things happening in real life. It takes advantages of opera, crosstalk, song-dance-duet and it has been known to people since the early 1980s. From then on, promoted by mass media, the comic sketch prospers and becomes the"Cultural Feast"with its brief form; humorous and laugh-triggering feature; material reflecting the lives of the masses; life-penetrating insights and ideological value.Humor is the most distinctive feature of comic sketches. It is extensively studied by scholars both abroad and home. There is abundant literature on this subject from perspectives of aesthetics, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and so on.Though comic sketches are passionately welcomed in China, remarkably few of researchers focus on verbal humor embodied in comic sketches. The present thesis studies the verbal humor in the comic sketch from perspectives of sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics.Zhao Benshan's comic sketch is the research object of this thesis because his works represent the most fruitful achievement in the field of sketch performance. If we pay some attention to his sketches, we may find that the occurrence of face threatening is usually followed by audience's hearty laughter. The present study is mainly conducted via qualitative analysis. The purpose is to find out how humor is generated and appreciated under the circumstances of face threatening or face saving. In this thesis, Brown and Levinson's Face Theory is applied to analyze the humor following face threatening acts. Face theory provides an explanation of the external demonstration of humor production, but how humor is perceived by the audience is not revealed. So, the setup-incongruity-resolution model of humor is presumed to account for the humor perception process. Based on the assumption and discussion, the humor model is tested with examples to demonstrate its explanatory power.An introduction will be given in the first part of this thesis, which is followed by an overview of comic sketches as well as humor studies. After this, the theoretical framework is constructed to lay a foundation for the following research. Then an analysis of humor in Zhao Benshan's comic sketches is conducted from face theory and the SIR model is tested with examples. Chapter five discusses the long whipped and reproached object, namely, the perfunctory, formalistic face work with specific examples, which also shows the educational function of the comic sketch. Finally, the conclusion brings this thesis to an end.