A Pragmatic Analysis Of Humor In American And Chinese Situation Comedies

As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in newspapers, movies, dramas,literature, advertising, and especially situation comedies. Situation comedy(abbreviated as sitcom hereafter) has won enormous popularity among the audience.In the past decades, the humorous language in American sitcoms has aroused theinterest of people who are engaged in linguistic studies. Most of them are conductedon the basis of stylistics, relevance theory, and discourse analysis. Recently, someresearchers also use the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle to studythe humor in American sitcoms. But few of them study both American and Chinesesitcoms from the perspective of the CP and PP and explore the similarities anddifferences of the ways in which American and Chinese sitcoms to create humor.This thesis selects American situation comedy Friends and Chinese sitcom MyOwn Swordsman as study objects, with an attempt to explore the similarities anddifferences of the ways in which American and Chinese sitcoms to create humor byanalyzing the humor in American and Chinese Situation Comedies from theperspective of the CP and the PP. This thesis adopts both quantitative approach andqualitative approach to achieve a more objective study result.The thesis finds that the majority of the humors in American and Chinesesitcoms are realized by flouting the CP and the PP, and the analysis result alsosuggests that there are the similarities and differences between the generation ofhumor in Chinese and American sitcoms by flouting the CP and the PP. With themajor findings, this study is expected to shed light on the further studies on thegeneration of humor in American and Chinese sitcoms from the perspectives of theCP and the PP. To some extent, the study may help the English learners or Chineselearners better enjoy and understand the humor in both sitcoms.