| Humor has been a popular subject of research for several decades. It is related to a number of subjects including linguistics, psychololgy, sociology and anthropology, to name just a few. Many approaches and theories have been developed to the study of humor and a great many articles have been published on different aspects of humor research. This thesis, based on these previous studies, attempts to conduct an empirical study of humor within two theroretical framework — genre analysis perspective and relevance theory perspective. There are the following two research questions the study intends to answer: (1) Why do Chinese humors generate on some readers, but not on others? (2) Since readers' cognitive environment leads to different humor appreciation, then what are the factors that affect readers' cognitive environment?Focusing on 80 Chinese humorous texts, the study employed 190 Chinese college students as the subjects to investigate the above-mentioned questions. The main research techniques used in this study include text analysis, questionnaires and interviews. As far as the first research question is concerned, it is readers themselves that decide their levels of humor appreciation. As to the second research question, two main factors inferred from the current corpus, background knowledge and personal beliefs, are found to affect subjects' cognitive environment.Althought this study is preliminary in nature, it examines humor from a fresh perspective by studying Chinese humorous texts using Chinese college students as its subjects. Its significance lies in the initiation of research fields, the choice of research subjects and research methods. Meanwhile, the present study creates some valuably feasible future research topics. Thus, humor is still waiting to be explored further.
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