A Stylistic Approach To Humor Analysis In American Situation Comedy

As a special form of drama, American situation comedies (sitcoms) have aroused the interests of Chinese audiences. However, as a foreign audience, we can not share some of the humor in American sitcoms with the American audience. We sit unaffected during the performance that makes the American audience roll with laughter. Why can't we understand the humor? What techniques are used to create the humor in sitcoms? In order to answer the questions and shed some light on appreciation of American sitcoms, four American sitcoms are selected to exemplify the humor. Based on contemporary stylistic theory the analysis is conducted from the phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels in order to probe the deviation displayed in the sitcoms. The analysis shows that the humor is achieved by the deliberate violation of the norms in standard language and conversational principles, especially those represented by the cooperative principle and the politeness principle. The major stylistic features of American sitcoms are considerately pointed out in the thesis. For Chinese audiences, the difficulties in appreciating the humor are mostly caused by the lack of awareness of variety between linguistic norms and deviance, the lack of knowledge about cultural differences, and the lack of experience in the situations which are common for Americans.