On The Comprehension And Reception Of Verbal Humor In Home With Kids From The Perspective Of Receptive Aesthetics

Humor can be said to be omnipresent. Humor study is an interdisciplinary one. Scholars both at home and abroad have been observing it extensively in the fields of physiology, psychology, rhetoric, philosophy, and even have expanded their humor study to anthropology, sociology, linguistics, pragmatics, aesthetics, etc. This thesis, based on the previous studies by those prestigious scholars, tries to explore verbal humor from a refreshing perspective----reception theory, with humorous utterances in a Chinese situation comedy Home with Kids as its corpus source.It is an uncontroversial fact that humorous language often appears in our daily communications but quite is different from everyday utterances. As one of carriers for humor, situation comedy, which was originated from the west, has been fancied by the masses for its humorous style in language. Chinese situation comedy, mingled with comedy features of such particular Chinese art as cross-talks and short comedies, is even attracting greater audience. Situation comedy is such that more and more people are becoming interested in studying it. As far as the author of this thesis knows, previous studies on it mainly fix attentions on American situation comedies from the perspective of pragmatics particularly based on conversational implicature and cooperative principle. It is attempted in this thesis to give an insightful analysis and interpretation for the comprehension and acceptance of verbal humor in Chinese situation comedy from receptive aesthetics. It is also hoped that the linguistic glamour of conversations in Chinese situation comedy will be revealed and valued.The author of this thesis puts forward the view that the popularity of situation comedy is mainly determined by how its verbal humor is comprehended and accepted. In addition, in this thesis, through careful investigations, the author tries to prove that the receptive aesthetics, though originally applied in literary fields, has strong interpretational power in many other fields. In this thesis, the major chapters are observed to find out aesthetic values of verbal humor and probe into the interpretation for the comprehension and acceptance of verbal humor from the perspective of receptive aesthetics, in particular, horizon of expectations. After careful observation, the author finds out that viewers understand and accept the verbal humor in the situation comedy for it meets their horizon of expectations. Due to the aesthetic distance and indeterminacy, whereas, verbal humor may provide leeway for viewers'imagination and further modify viewers'expectation horizon.In this thesis, the previous studies on humor as well as theoretical origin of receptive aesthetics are reviewed first. Then in brief, this thesis runs back over the development of Chinese situation comedy and its basic features as well as an outline of Home with Kids, the most popular Chinese television situation comedy in 2007. Then, a case analysis of verbal humor in Home with Kids from the perspective of receptive aesthetics is made.This thesis, by probing into the verbal humor embodied in Chinese situation comedy from the perspective of receptive aesthetics, also aims to bring forward the quintessence of language arts, which will lead the audience to better understand the linguistic traits of situation comedies and therefore facilitate their comprehension and appreciation of humor.