An Adaptation-Relevance Analysis On Verbal Humor In Zhao Benshan's Comic Sketch

Humor as a pervasive human phenomenon is observable in many spheres and aspects of our daily life. It is mainly carried by the language used in a certain context funnily to bring forth the humorous effect. People can better adjust interpersonal relationship, transfer mutual conflict to harmony, embarrassment to easiness by means of humor. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, many scholars from various disciplines have been working on humor. Recent years scholars have studied humor from the linguistic perspective, promoting the further development of humor research. Humor can be found in various works such as cartoon, joke, cross talk and comic sketch and so forth. As a special carrier of humor, comic sketch has attracted millions of audiences with humorous utterances. Among others, Zhao Benshan's comic sketch praises or criticizes the daily life with humorous lines and with an abundance of up-to-date and prevalent social issues, not only bringing about laughter to audience but making his sketches so highly informative and fascinating as to trigger the enlightenment of audience and leaving them with an enduring aftertaste, thus called the representative of Chinese comic sketch. Then how is the verbal humor in the sketch produced by performers and interpreted by audiences? It is the key issue to be solved in the thesis.Based on the achievements made by the previous researchers, the present study explores the verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's comic sketch in the light of Adaptation-Relevance Model so as to reveal the feasibility of this model in explaining the verbal humor in comic sketches. This thesis is based on the qualitative and descriptive methods to analyze the selected examples. It finally reaches the conclusion that the Adaptation-Relevance Model is feasible for elaborating the humorous communication between performers and audiences, and the process of verbal humor production and interpretation in comic sketches is that of adaptation and relevance. As the integration of two powerful pragmatic theories——Adaptation Theory and Relevance Theory, Adaptation-Relevance Model has been applied for the analysis of various linguistic phenomena. However, no research has been made on Chinese comic sketch in line with Adaptation-Relevance Model. Thereby this study, to some extent, not only infuses a new flood to the humor research, but also expands the application of this model to this field.