Humor In American Sitcom

As a form of language expression and communication which distinctively existsin human society, humor enjoys profound content, wide range of study, and representsthe incomparable wisdom and creativity of the mankind. It has attracted greatattention from various academic fields, within which a lot of research has been donewith divergent understandings and conclusions.In recent decades, situational comedy has been gaining more and morepopularity among audience all over the world. Humor can be regarded as the coreelement of sitcom and it’s the key criterion to judge the level of sitcom. In situationalcomedy, humor is not only an art of performance, but also an art of languageapplication and idea output.This study reviews and classifies the previous varied studies of humor, aiming tomake the interpretation of humor more definite and improve the analysis of generationand appreciation mechanism of humor. The study then selects the hit American sitcomThe Big Bang Theory as the corpus for discourse analysis from the perspective ofHalliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, mainly focusing on transitivity system,modality system and cohesive devices, in order to probe into the realization of threemetafunctions of language, namely, ideational, interpersonal and textual function.Based on the qualitative analysis, it is found that, humorous effects can beachieved in dialogues by controlling the variables of transitivity system, modalitysystem and cohesion ties. Participants can rearrange the interpersonal relations indialogues in an unexpected way, thus completing certain interpersonal purposes,through switch of mood and topic, dominance of talking track, etc. In The Big BangTheory, the characters tend to make marked use of all the interpersonal and cohesivedevices, so as to break the rules and stereotypes of communication and create humor.