| Humor is a pervasive human phenomenon, which plays important roles in many spheres and aspects of life, in various human interactions and especially in jokes and humorous styles. Humorous utterances are quite common in our life. The researches in humor are so enormous that it can be said that there are as many theories as there are theorists. The researches can range from traditional fields such as psychology, physiology and philosophy to such broader ones as anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology, and many others. With the great changes in the field of linguistics, the theories of semantics and pragmatics now provide new perspectives on humor studies. Nowadays the study of humor has already become a special and independent discipline. The present thesis is an attempt to explore English humor in communication from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. After a review of the theories of humor mechanism, the author brings examples into the sphere of semantics and pragmatics for analysis. In the scope of semantics, the exploration of humor is made through the analysis of ambiguity which is a feature of language, universal in natural languages, while in the sphere of pragmatics the discussion of humor is combined with the Relevance Theory and the Conceptual Blending Theory respectively. Through the discussion, both theories show their strong power in interpreting verbal humor, but at the same time it is found that there exist defects in each theory, and encouragingly they can provide supplements to each other. The integrative discussion of these two theories can provide a new perspective to the interpretation of humor. The author concludes the whole thesis by summarizing the key ideas of the thesis, highlighting its possible contributions to the linguistic research of humor and its limitations and also welcoming a broader discussion of the social and practical significance of humor studies, especially in China.
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