The Study Of Zhao Benshan’s Comic TV Sketches From The Perspective Of Frame-shifting

Comic sketch is a quite familiar artistic form in the modern artistic stage, which is a kind of performance art as well as a language art. With its humorous style and lively language, it captures the hearts of a great many of Chinese people. Raised from the Northeast of China, Zhao Benshan’s works are filled with strong local characteristics and rapidly sweep the whole country. Since his works Xiangqin (Dating) firstly played on the stage of CCTV in 1990, his unique style of acting, proficient performance skills and humorous art language greatly enhance the glamour of his works and make him keep the first prize of the Gala Comic Programs for 14 years. There are a large number of factors contributed to his great success, while this paper will only focus on the verbal humour of his works.Based on the language of Zhao Benshan’s classical works performed on CCTV, this paper takes the research method of theory analysis with examples, and by means of the comparison and analysis of texts, theories as well as the corpus, it aims to make a study on the linguistic rules and human beings’cognitive mechanism behind the laughter according to the theory of frame-shifting, and try to find out the triggers which cause frame-shifting.Frame-shifting, in nature, is a sort of conceptual revision. It reflects the operation process of semantic reanalysis that the existing information will be reorganized in a new formed frame. Influenced by the frame-shifting, listeners will realize the conflict between their original expectation and the reality on the conversations when they are enjoying the comic sketches, and they have to make some psychological adjustment to understand the joy from another way. Such a process was called“Semantic leap”by Coulson in 1997 (Coulson, 2001). Therefore, they can obtain the humorous effect according to actively changing their faults like that of the Garden Path so as to understand the sudden joy. The theory of frame-shifting pays especial attention to the dynamic aspect of language understanding, which is also the key to the production of humorous effect in comic sketches. Therefore, it can offer a good academic guidance to the study of comic sketches.This paper attempts to study the triggers of frame-shifting from the aspects of lexicon and discourse. The research of lexical triggers is based on the micro point of view and will be studied in details in accordance with the three characteristics of lexicon per se, including ambiguity, vagueness and generality. Discourse is a more embracing term which lays its stress to the macro point of view--- context. The discoursal triggers can be divided into such three types as linguistic context, situational context and cultural context. To study comic sketches from the perspective of frame-shifting is a new try and to a certain degree, it will be helpful to encourage the creators of comic sketches to study them from a new point of view so as to create more and better wonderful classic works. Besides, it can build a cultural bridge for the foreigners who are interested in Chinese comic sketches to know clearly about our culture.