Cultural Schema And Humor Interpretation

Humor exists in every aspect of our daily life. We can find and feel it. It is now an essential part in ordinary people's life rather than the patent of few humorists. Humor is a bursting memorable and fascinating area full of wisdom and interest. It has played and is playing an important role in our social life, in various human interactions and especially in jokes and humorous styles. Nowadays the study of humor has already become a special and independent discipline.Traditional researcher of humor has expanded from the field of literature, rhetoric, physiology, philosophy to that of education, sociology, aesthetics and humanism. In the field of linguistics, from the late of 1970s, humor has been functioning throughout all branches of linguistics. The traditional works of humor have three theories: Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief theory, while the recent studies of humor are represented by Raskin's (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humor(SSTH) and Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH). We find that compared with English studies on humor, Chinese studies haven't formed a system, so the Chinese scholars still have used the Western theory.Humor can be regarded as a special form of language and language is an important part of culture, so humor researchers pay more attention to the study of humor in the cross-cultural study. However,? few people have ever interpreted humor from the cognitive and cultural perspective. Therefore, the paper intends to apply cultural schema theory to humor interpretation as to investigate how cultural background knowledge influences the understanding of humor and what role cultural schema plays in humor interpretations, and then explore the importance of cultural schema building in cross-cultural communication.An investigation was made in the form of questionnaire and interview. Eight representative humors, which cover religious, historical, geographical, political and other field, were selected into the survey. Forty-five English-major sophomores and fifty-six non-English-major sophomores in Haerbin University of Science and Technology participated in the investigation. The randomly chosen subjects were asked to read all the humorous jokes and then answered the related questions. An interview was made to see whether they could truly understand the selected humor; what they thought the humorous points were and which humors they did feel interesting at all. According to the survey data analysis, we found that the English majors` humor perception differed from that of the non-English majors as a result of related pre-stored cultural background knowledge. Regardless of linguistic factors, the lack of cultural schema is the biggest barrier to cultural humor interpretation and this can explain cross-cultural communication problems and obstacles.