A Study Of Conversational Humor And Gender In Sitcom Seinfeld

The study of language gender is one of the major subjects in sociolinguistics. Humor, as a language phenomenon, is a hot topic in the field of linguistics. This thesis, concentrating on conversational humor and gender, aims to find out the similarities and differences of males and females in their humorous utterances under the guidance of pragmatic theories, namely the Cooperative Principle and the Speech Act Theory.Seinfeld is one of the most popular sitcoms in America in the 1990s. It portrays the life of ordinary people. Many of its episodes are based on the writers' real experiences.The author chooses 95 transcripts randomly from the sitcom Seinfeld and divides them into same-gender (all-male and all-female) and mixed-gender groups. After the examination and analysis of the data, the author finds out that there are similarities as well as differences among male, female, and mixed-gender groups. Representatives are the most frequently used way of expressing humor in all the three groups. Directives rank second in mixed-gender groups. Besides, men often use questions in all-male groups, while women do it in mixed-gender groups. Both men's and women's humor tend to be aggressive-based in single-sex groups. But in mixed-gender groups, people all try to achieve solidarity by humor.