A Study On Verbal Humor In Zhao Benshan's Sketches From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Language, as human's peculiar ability, functions as a tool for people's communication. The creation and the expression of humor depend on language in quite many cases. So among all types of humor, verbal humor is one that we find most easily in everyday life. Verbal humor holds great interest for scholars both eastern and western and some exciting process has been made both home and abroad in its studies from psychology and sociology points of view. It is since the publication of Relevance: Cognition and Communication that much systematic and pragmatic research has been done on verbal humor. Verbal humor of Zhao Benshan's sketches is filled with strong local flavor and the linguistic feature is distinct. However present studies on Zhao Benshan's sketches have not arrived at certain theoretical height expect some comments on its linguistic features. This thesis attempts to combine linguistic theory with Zhao Benshan's sketches from the perspective of relevance theory.According to the analysis of verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's sketches from Spring Festival evening party of China Central Television, the study indicates that influenced by the cognitive tendency, in the first phase of the appreciation of verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's sketches, audiences construct an interpretation to the utterance and then find the failure of communication. Punch line makes them choose a new context to construct the proper interpretation. As a result the humor effect is realized. Based on this discussed above, this paper analyzes humor strategies and language tactics realized by these strategies of verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's sketches from the perspective of relevance theory. The analysis concludes that the performer of humor (Zhao Benshan and his partner) suggests the production of humor by language, then, audiences notice the incongruity through these clues and find the incongruity component in the sketches with a relax mood, humor is generated in this way. In such a case, incongruity is major, congruity is minor. But congruity as well as incongruity is the key point of humor production in Zhao Benshan's sketches. This thesis researches on the mechanism of Zhao's Humor reveals the quintessence of language. And the glamour of Chinese language will be greatly valued and cherished. Moreover, the study offers some guidance for readers to appreciate verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's sketches.