The Analysis Of Humor In Zhao Benshan’s Short Comedies From The Perspective Of Presupposition

Humor is one of the special linguistic competences of human beings. It is also aconcentrated reflection of verbal wit. The study on humor has been conducted bydifferent scholars both domestic and abroad, including philosophers and linguists. Theyall propose their own viewpoints. The traditional western theories on humorinclude incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory. But it is believed thatrelief theory and superiority theory can’t account for all the humor. Then as a morecomprehensive explanation of humor, incongruity theory, which focuses on the cognitiveelement of humor, is becoming a dominant theory on the study of humor frompsychological respect.The short comedies of Zhao Benshan enjoy great popularity in both Spring FestivalGala and our daily programs, and his short comedies have become a relativelyindispensable part in most of the important celebration parties in both CCTV and otherlocal TV stations. In Zhao Benshan’s performance, he produces the unique humor bytaking full advantage of the features of Chinese language, especially northeast dialects.Therefore a special name is assigned to this unique humor of Zhao Benshan, that is,Zhao’s humor. Zhao’s humor is closely related to the life of common people, especiallythe peasants, in both expressive methods and content. Thought is aroused by humor andseriousness is intervened in the jokes, therefore, the works of Zhao are widely acceptedby the public. Through elaborate analyzing of the transcripts of Zhao Benshan’s shortcomedies, it is believed that presupposition is one of the most important tools that healways employs to create humor.The thesis is composed of three main parts, the introduction, main body and theconclusion. The main organization and content is as follows:The first part is the introduction, which introduces the diversified viewpoints heldby different scholars on humor, including the definition of humor on the Dictionary ofWebster, and opinions proposed by Lin Yutang, Palmer etc. And then a brief summary ofZhao’s short comedies are provided. Honored as the “King of Short Comedies”, ZhaoBenshan takes full advantage of the essence of Chinese language and creates his Zhao’shumor. The identification of Zhao’s humor is basically following the practice of twoscholars, Mervis and Johnson proposed in1997. The second part is the main body, which consists of four main chapters:Chapter One is the literature review of the theories concerned. It includes two mainsections, the research on humor and the understanding of related theory onpresupposition. About the research on humor, firstly the notion of humor of differentscholars will be talked about and secondly traditional theories on humor will be provided.About the understanding of presupposition, a presentation of presupposition triggers willbe talked about, including the classification of the presupposition triggers made byVerschueren, Levinson, and He Ziran. Furthermore, examples will be provided fornecessary interpretation.Chapter Two is an elaborate analysis of humor in Zhao Benshan’s short comedies onthe basis of four manipulations of presupposition. It is said that the short comedy inChina is an integrated miniature of the socio-cultural lives of Chinese people. As atraditional Chinese form of art with long history, Chinese short comedies own distinctivefeatures compared with other art forms. Major characteristics of Chinese short comediesare given and then a detailed analysis is carried out according to the four manipulationsof presupposition, that is, cancelled presupposition, preserved presupposition,contradicted presupposition, as well as false presupposition.About cancelled presupposition, certain linguistic structure produces certainpresuppositions, but the presuppositions could be cancelled by the conflicts between theoriginal presuppositions and the background information, particular context, orconnotation of utterance. This phenomenon is called cancelled presupposition. Usuallycancelled presupposition is influenced by certain context factors. The manipulation ofcancelled presupposition is to some extent the opposite of preserved presupposition.About preserved presupposition, it has been noticed that presupposition could bepreserved in the negation of a sentence or an expression with factual predicates. Whensometimes social barriers or embarrassment occur in verbal exchange, speaker mayreorganize the utterance, but the original presuppositions that lead to the social barriers orembarrassment may still survive, therefore, the congruities appear between the meaningsof reorganized sentences and the actual connotations of words.About false presupposition, it is a kind of supernormal manipulation ofpresupposition, produced in concrete communication, which is different from the normal one. The supernormal aspect reflects in the situation where a speaker takes uncommonlyshared knowledge as presupposition information. About the two forms of expression ingenerating humor, one form is making use of the implicit false background information,and another is regarding the false information as the presupposition materials of latterwords. The difference between the contradicted presupposition and false presuppositionis that the former one is always done purposefully and the latter one is demonstrated byspeakers unconsciously.Chapter Three is a detailed exploration of humor induced by presupposition-basedincongruities in Zhao Benshan’s short comedies from a different angle. To begin with,the presentation of incongruities in Chinese short comedies is given. Next, thepresupposition analysis based on incongruity theory is showed including thepresupposition incongruous with general knowledge, incongruous with actual situationand the causes of presupposition-based incongruities.About presupposition incongruous with general knowledge, in some cases, thepresupposition of the utterance of one speaker contradicts the actual intention of anotherspeaker, because the misunderstandings in general knowledge, or to say, the commonsense shared by most people. Secondly about presupposition incongruous with actualsituation, it is pointed out that the underlying reason of the conflict is the incongruitybetween the original presupposition of the speaker’s statement and the actual situation.Then the reasons of the presupposition-based incongruities are further explored.Presupposition-based incongruities can be said result from several main reasons, like thethinking pattern of the speakers, the ignorance of speakers, the ambiguity of language, aswell as the speakers’ special intentions.Chapter Four is the analysis of the implication of Zhao’s humor. It conveys twomain parts, one is about the exploration of the connotation of Zhao’s humor and the otheris about the strategies for better understanding Zhao’s humor.In fact, it is not an easy task to give a thorough connotation of Zhao’s humorbecause the connotation of it is from many aspects, and the method of producing Zhao’shumor is very flexible, however, it is acknowledged that Zhao’s humor is closely relatedto the life of common people, especially the peasants, and the connotation of Zhao’shumor can be said is showing in its distinctive style of utterances by using typical Chinese dialect, especially northeast dialect. It is also found that the two methods, despiteothers and self-despite, are efficient ways to create Zhao’s humor. Despite others refers tothe method when one actor uncovers and ridicules the weakness showed in others andhighlights his or her superiority in creating humor. Self-despite refers to the method whenone actor laughs at the non-wisdom of himself or herself by disclosing his or herweakness and humor is produced from it.About the strategies for better understanding Zhao’s humor, sometimes the elaboratedesigned humor may fail to gain expected laughter due to the different livingenvironments and culture backgrounds of people. Therefore some strategies are proposedfollowing the two traits of the manipulations of presuppositions, the distinct inferentialcourses of presuppositions and certain presuppositions of certain expressions. About thedistinct inferential courses of presuppositions, sometimes suggestive words or utterancesare needed for the correct comprehension of the designed presuppositions. Aboutcertain expressions deducing certain presuppositions, it is advised that some necessaryexplanations of certain utterances could be showed in the subtitle position.The last part is the conclusion, which makes a summary to the preceding analysis,and points out the main purpose of this thesis. The intention of the thesis is to explore theforming mechanism of Zhao’s humor by presupposition analysis. Although Zhao’s humorwins much popularity among people, there has been little relatively comprehensiveanalysis from the perspective of presupposition. In this thesis a systematic survey isconducted from two perspectives, the classification of the manipulating presuppositionand the presupposition based incongruity. The two forms of explorations are just fromdifferent angles, conduct in parallel and a lot of examples are provided for detailedexplanation. It is wished that a deep analysis of the forming mechanism of Zhao’s humorcould be achieved, the underlying reasons of the formation of humor can be obtained,and the features of Chinese language, especially northeast dialect can be revealed.