A Multidimensional Study On The Humorous Lines In The American Situation Comedy

Throughout the history, numerous researches on humor have been carried out.However, just as language is profound and complicated, so is humor which is oftencontained and delivered by language, and most previous researches on humor have beendone from one angle or based on a specific theory or approach in one field, such asthose done in the field of sociology, philosophy, psychology and rhetoric and etc.Therefore, the study here attempts to integrate the linguistic structure study, contextstudy with the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle in order to provide amultidimensional framework for a more comprehensive and in-depth study of verbalhumor.This paper reviews and reflects upon the previous studies on humor generationand comprehension mechanism. And it discusses the deficiency of studies on humorfrom a mono perspective or based on one single theory or approach and the need tostudy it from multiple dimensions. Then by integrating linguistic structure study,context study with the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, it attempts toprovide a multidimensional framework under which the generation and comprehensionof verbal humor can be studied more completely and deeply.In order to illustrate how the multidimensional framework can be applied toexplain the verbal humor generation and comprehension process, we build a closedcorpus based on the first10episodes in Season3of the recent popular AmericanSituation Comedy “Big Bang”, and then we select50examples from the collected datawith reference to the background laughter in the videos and categorize them into fourtypes and make a concentrated and detailed analysis of the verbal humor contained inthose examples under the multidimensional framework. Through concrete analysis ofverbal humor contained in the selected examples under the multidimensional framework,we can come to the two conclusions: firstly, it is necessary and feasible to provide themultidimensional framework for a more comprehensive and in-depth study and more powerful explanation of verbal humor; secondly, most verbal humor in the situationalcomedy is produced by a combination of those three factors, that is, it is, in most cases,the result of linguistic deviation, contextual factors and observance or violation of theCP and PP combined, instead of just one factor and thus the study and explanation ofverbal humor should also take multiple factors into consideration rather than be from amono perspective.