On Verbal Humor Of Sitcom My Own Swordsman From Linguistic Perspective

As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in literature, in the movies, on televisions, in our life, etc. Humor plays an important role in our social life. In daily communication, humor not only ameliorates human relations, improves the communicative atmosphere, but also is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. Therefore, more and more scholars in all kinds of the fields are paying a great deal of attention to its nature.As an artistic form of expressing humorous sense in language and an original form imported from foreign countries, situation comedy had won enormous popularity among Chinese audience. For instance, the first Chinese-specific situation comedy based on net literature, My Own Swordsman, has won great popularity among the audience since its debut. What is worth noticing is its witty and humorous utterances, punch lines, unique images. And all these impressive characteristics aroused an echo in audience's state of mind, resulting in a heated and controversial discussion on this sitcom. To associate it with the general social background that China has been undergoing an unprecedented revolution on social structure and an overwhelming transformation on social culture. All this indicates the arrival of the Age of Mass Entertainment and the great prevalence of mass culture. Being a pattern featured with mass culture, situation comedy directly or indirectly reflects the real society. My Own Swordsman serves as a typical example which just caters for this trend to work out humor by portraying trivial life and reveal the significance of enjoying life with a playful state of mind characterized in Postmodernism.This thesis intends to conduct a tentative research on the analysis of humorous effects and humor mechanism underlying in the sitcom My Own Swordsman. The central part of this thesis is the descriptive analysis of the punch lines with humor hints only. It serves as a tentative application of the linguistics theories. In convenience of a thorough analysis, the thesis, in its first place, delimits the definition of "humor" in the sitcom My Own Swordsman. With this delimitation as the premise and with the theoretical support out of the linguistics theories and on the basis of one of the most influential humor theories----the incongruity theory, the analysis is carried out, by analyzing to find out the cause of humor in the sitcom My Own Swordsman.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.