An Analysis On Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of The Speech Act Theory

As the idiosyncratic communication ways of human beings, humor is a treasureof speakers’ wisdom and attitude of life. The correct understanding and analysis,including the capability to comprehend the production and creation of humor ofEnglish conversation, is significant and profound for English learners.The research on humor begins from the perspective of aesthetics. With thedevelopment of the cognition on humor, the research on verbal humor from theperspective of linguistics thrived and matured. These years, more and more verbalhumor studies paid attention to the pragmatics and cognitive linguistics and thedomestic studies from pragmatics ways also increased. At the aspect of materials, itrequires no argument that the situation comedy plays an indispensable and significantrole in verbal humor analysis. Situation comedies provide abundant verbal humormaterials for pragmatic study. The big bang theory is a very popular and influentialAmerican situation comedy. With its distinctive language and dynamic humor, it canbe taken as a good representative for the studies on verbal humor.Based on the former humor theories, this research attempted to analyze theverbal humor occurring in this situation comedy from the perspective of pragmatics.Additionally it tried to explore the representative and typical verbal humor with theapplication of Speech Act Theory. What’ more, the inner mechanism hidden in thehumorous language has been investigated and the intrinsic structure in humorouslanguage has also been explored tentatively. Twenty episodes have been drawn fromthis program at random, and they were analyzed with the approach of qualitativeresearch. The verbal humor has been analyzed under the frame of Speech Act Theory,and the generation mechanism of humor has been emphasized.With the analysis of verbal humor happening in this situation comedy, thisresearch has furthered the exploration on the generation mechanism of humor. The perspective of Speech Act Theory is relatively novel and enriched the analyticaltheories for the verbal humor of situation comedy. This attempt has deepened theunderstanding to the inner mechanism of verbal humor, which is conducive to thecomposing of verbal humor in situation comedy and helpful to the appreciation of it.