A Comparative Study Between American And Chinese Humor-Based On The Conceptual Blending Theory

With the increasingly frequent development of international communication, people from different cultures long for a kind of communication that contains no obstruction. Among so many communication manners, comprehending and producing humor play important roles. Since humor is a kind of lubricant, it can eliminate estrangement and establish a closer relationship. Due to these merits of humors, people from different cultures have a strong desire to use humors properly and comprehend humor exactly. However, owing to the disparities of language, thought, culture and so on, humor almost is the most difficult speech act to comprehend.This present paper which bases on Conceptual Blending Theory would pay attention to humor speech acts. It would compare the similarities and differences of humorous dialogs in the chosen Chinese and American sitcoms in an effort to provide an understanding of the cultural factors that influence Chinese and American humor and break a new path for the study of humor in future research.In this paper, a total of 200 humorous dialogs, 100 from Chinese sitcom I Love My Family (hereinafter ILMF) and 100 from American sitcom Friends are collected by the means of taking notes when watching them. Based on these corpuses, a statistic research is carried out to compare the difference of humor modes.By analyzing the humorous dialogs in terms of domains, mapping modes of Conceptual Blending Theory, there are some findings from the statistic research: it was found that there is no big difference of preference about the mappings modes between Chinese humor and American humor, both Chinese and American prefer using the projection mapping first, the pragmatic function mappings rank the second and schema mapping are the last choice; there is an evident distinction between Chinese favorite domains of humor and that of Americans, Chinese are more likely to prefer humor related to political and military domains while Americans do not have such particular preference; American people prefer to the 3 inputs models. 83.64% projection mappings are made up of the three input spaces model, but Chinese people have less preference for inputting the third spaces which can create humor.The similarities of preference between Chinese and American lay in the common physiological features of human kind. And the differences contribute to the culture factors that China is moderate and hierarchical and America is individualism and free. These results are helpful for people to understand the cultural backgrounds and provide a new angle of view for the future study of humor...