An Adaptive Analysis Of The Humorous Language In Chinese Comic Sketches

As a kind of TV entertaining program, comic sketch is one of the major forms in the modern Chinese comic art. It aims to create relaxing and humorous atmosphere, helping the audience obtain much inspiration in an agreeable mood. Thus, in comic sketches, simple and humorous linguistic forms and vivid performances are often used, which brings great pleasure to the audience. Many Chinese linguistic researchers have studied the humorous language in comic sketches from the perspectives of rhetoric, syntax, pragmatics, cognition, and semantics. Most of the pragmatic studies are based on Wilson's Relevance Theory and Grice's Cooperative Principle. These studies can help people have a deeper understanding of the humorous language in comic sketches, but none of them reveal this linguistic phenomenon comprehensively and dynamically. In this thesis, we adopt Verschueren's Adaptation Theory to analyze dynamically the humorous language in the comic sketches performed by Zhao Benshan on the stage of CCTV Spring Festival Gala Evening.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, the thesis consists of four chapters. The introduction discusses the significance, objectives and framework of this thesis. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the definition and classification of humor, and then it reviews the studies on humor both at home and abroad, the development of Chinese comic sketches, the features of comic sketches and the relative studies. Chapter two gives a detailed description of the theoretical framework of the thesis-Adaptation Theory. Chapter three analyzes humorous language in comic sketches from the perspective of contextual correlates of adaptability. This chapter mainly discusses how the three worlds (mental world, social world and physical world) influence the choice of humorous language in comic sketches. Chapter four makes an analysis of the common humorous devices adopted in comic sketches from the five levels of structural objects of adaptability:sound level, lexical level, syntactic level, proposition and suprasentential level. In the end we draw the conclusion that the linguistic choice-making in comic sketches is influenced by such factors as personality, emotion, desires and intentions in mental world; social setting, social status, occupation and culture in social world;time and space in physical world. The common humorous devices adopted in comic sketches can be found at every level of structural objects.