The Verbal Humor In American Talk Shows-From The Perspective Of CBT

Humor plays a very crucial role in daily life, especially in human interactions. The western research on humor can date back to ancient times.So far, the researches on humor have extended to different fields such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics,art, etc. For linguistics,most of the studies on humor are from the aspects of phonetics,morphology, pragmatics and rhetoric. Recently, with the development of the cognitive linguistics, the study on verbal humor from cognitive point of view began to draw much attention.According to Fauconnier and Turner(1998a),conceptual blending theory has a great explanatory force on various levels of meaning construction. The author of this thesis intends to make a survey of English verbal humor from conceptual blending theory perspective, attempting to explore the dynamic process of humor generation by application of the humorous utterance examples in Weekend Update, a talk show segment of American entertaining TV program Saturday Night Live.Owned by National Broadcasting Company, broadcast for the first time in 1975, Saturday Night Live has always been one of the most popular entertaining TV programs in America, whose audience rating keeps high. The material of Weekend Update comes from the latest news about celebrities such as political leaders, well-known stars, chief events, festivals, etc. Therefore, compared with the common situational comedies, jokes or sketches which contain too much purposive modification, the language of Weekend Update are rather fresher and more artless. What's more,because much material is from the political news or instant events, the language of Weekend Update is full of a sense of reality and profundity, which also exactly sets up lots of obstacles to some extent before Chinese audience and English learners and make them hang back fearing the apprehension and appreciation of the English humor.Conceptual blending theory is developed from mental space theory. The core of conceptual blending theory is conceptual blending network, which has five sub-networks:simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network, double-scope network and multiple blend networks.The thesis will select several pieces of humorous language in Weekend Update as data to analyze the meaning construction and cognitive mechanism of understanding English verbal humor from the perspective of five conceptual blending networks.It proves that conceptual blending theory has mighty explanatory power for English verbal humor in American talk shows.The findings of the thesis can help Chinese audience and English learners to comprehend and appreciate the humorous utterances in American talk shows, which ultimately reinforce the intercultural communication.