Understanding Jokes In Context: An Intercultural Perspective

As a pervasive phenomenon in human interaction, humor has been studied a lot in such various fields as psychology, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology and many others. Humor has come within the scope of linguistics because language itself becomes the subject matter of humor and the comprehension and appreciation of humor are determined, to a considerable degree, by the use of language and by the cultural attitudes and values associated with it.Verbal humor has become one of the interests of linguists who have developed abundant theories of this topic, among which the pragmatic considerations have provided promising explanations of its working mechanism, appreciation and functions, etc. Though pragmatic theories have explained verbal humor well in that it takes context as the core consideration in examining verbal humor, we should also bear in mind the fact that the cultural factors play a determining role in the interpretation of context in different cultures. Based on the previous research fruit of verbal humor, this thesis focuses on joke—a typical genre of humorous discourse—to tentatively make a contrastive analysis of cultural factors that determine joking preference and the different values embedded in jokes in English and Chinese in different sociocultural contexts.The thesis consists of six parts. Introduction gives a general description of the concepts of humor and joke. Chapter one deals with the definition, classification of humor and its multi-disciplined studies. Chapter two reviews some major theories of verbal humor in linguistic field, with the focus on pragmatic theories. Chapter three emphasizes the studying of jokes in context and analyzes the components that influence joke telling events in different sociocultural context by the aid of Hymes' SPEAKING model. Chapter four examines the interpretation of jokes in intercultural communication and employs a contrastive analysis on several aspects of underlying values in American and Chinese culture through the manifestation of joke; implications for the translation of jokes and the use of jokes in the teaching of English are also included. The last part comes to the conclusion and limitation of this thesis.