Linguistic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Zhao Benshan's Comic Sketches: A Relevance Theoretic Perspective

Humor is an extremely common phenomenon in communication, which takes the jocular language as the carrier to create humorous effects through the interaction with the context. As a kind of intentional humor, the comic sketch is a traditional art from in China, which amuses the audiences by their jocular language and humorous behaviors. As the representative of the comic sketch in China, Zhao Benshan's comic sketches are very popular for their distinctive humorous language and have been awarded the first prize for twelve years in CCTV Spring Festival Gala Evening since 1999. The popularity of Zhao's comic sketches and a large number of humorous utterances are the key reasons why the author of this thesis chooses them as the data of research.The dissertation attempts to use relevance theory which was put forward by Sperber and Wilson to interpret the humorous utterances of Zhao Benshan's comic sketches. Relevance theory presents two kinds of relevance--maximal relevance and optimal relevance. When the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance is incongruous with the speaker's actual utterance of optimal relevance, humor effects arise. The author chooses thirteen of Zhao Benshan's comic sketches from the internet as a sample for the current research. This research follows the method of qualitative study. This thesis provides a profound analysis of the humorous utterances in Zhao's comic sketches and discloses some specific language techniques involved, including phonological techniques, semantic techniques, rhetorical techniques and pragmatic techniques. These techniques play an important role in Zhao Benshan's humor production, which make his comic sketches be unique and classic. However, Zhao intends almost each turn of the conversation to be humorous while the audience may fail to catch it due to a variety of reasons. By analyzing a number of humorous data in Zhao's comic sketches, the author finds that there are two significant barriers to a full understanding of Zhao's humor. One is language, the other is context. In terms of relevance theory, they form obstacles to searching for optimal relevance.