Comparative Analysis Of Humor In Zhao Benshan’s Sketches From Perspective Of Relevance Theory And Cooperative Principle

Humor plays an important and essential role in everyday life. It can help us solvethe problems in our daily life. More and more people have already realized theimportance of humor. To be a humorous person, it is not enough for us to only learn howto analyze humor and appreciate humor. We should also learn how to create humorouseffect. These two points are very important. Humor can be sensed and seen nearlyeverywhere in our daily life. Humor plays a great and essential role in some importantoccasions. Especially in the social occasions, the importance of humor is more obvious.when a person，especially a great one，is judged from such a capacity. It can help leadersto point out shortcomings or wrong behavior of his subordinates without letting them feelembarrassed or awkward. So sometimes we also regard it as a certain kind of art. It is onekind of verbal art. Humor is important in everyone’s life，whoever he is. You can dealwith all kinds of embarrassing occasion with this special skill.As a kind of art form, sketch is liked and enjoyed by people all over China. Thereare many sketch performers in China. For example, Chen PeiSi, Zhu Shimao, HuangHong, Pang Changjiang, Zhao Benshan and Song Dandan. The sketches they performare enjoyed by TV audiences and they are all liked by the TV audiences. Zhao Benshan isone of the typical persons in these actors. He also becomes the symbol of sketch. ZhaoBenshan’s sketches are liked by a variety of Chinese audiences both young and old. Hissketch is also one of the most popular and most welcomed programs on the stage ofSpring Festival Gala Meeting nearly every year. And his sketches are given the first prizein the competition of the audiences’ most welcomed programs of Spring Festival GalaMeeting. If we only laugh at the sketch, that is not enough. We must get to know why welaugh. And we must also get to know what the laughing point for us is. These are thequestions that we have to solve. As an important branch of linguistic, pragmatics isgetting more and more attention as well as emphasis. It is a good way to explain humorin sketches. Through pragmatics we can know why we laugh. Relevance Theory andCooperative principle are two important theories in pragmatics. They can be used toanalyze humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches. This thesis employs the two theories toanalyze humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches.This thesis consists of three parts: The first part is the introduction to the thesis. It introduces humor and it alsointroduces humor study both at home and abroad. The history of humor study abroad hasa longer history than the history of humor study at home. So the achievement whichforeign researchers get is more than that is gotten by Chinese researchers. This is quiteobvious. The introduction part also introduces the study of humor in Zhao Benshan’ssketches carried out in China as well as the purpose and significance of the research.Many researchers carry out their research on humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches frommany different points of view. The author of this thesis analyzes humor in ZhaoBenshan’s sketches from the perspective of Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory.The second part is the main body of the whole thesis, including four chapters.In chapter one there are three parts. The first part is about the introduction of humorand comic sketches. This part introduces the definitions, features and classifications ofhumor. Different scholars have different understanding about humor, so there are manydifferent notions about humor. There are some key elements which are the same in thesenotions. Besides, the first part introduces the definition, origin and development of sketch.The second part gives a brief introduction to Zhao Benshan and Zhao Benshan’s sketches.There are many key elements in Zhao Benshan’s sketches which are worth analyzing andstudying. The third part is about the theoretical framework of this thesis. It introduces theCooperative Principle and Relevance Theory. The two theories are both the mostimportant theories in pragmatics. Both of them are good at explaining the humor.In chapter two, humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches is analyzed from the perspectiveof Cooperative Principle. To be more accurate it is from the perspective of four maximsof principle. There are four maxims of principle in Cooperative Principle. They aremaxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance and maxim of manner. Thehumor in sketches is created and produced through violating or flouting the four maximsof principle. This chapter includes four parts. The first part is about the violating orflouting of the maxim of quantity. The maxim of quantity requires that in the discourse ofsocial communication the speaker should provide information that is neither too muchnor too little. Too much information or too little information will influence theunderstanding ability of the hearer. The second part is about the violation or flouting ofthe maxim of quality. The maxim of quality requires that the speaker must say something that is real instead of telling lies. It also requires that the speaker must say something thatis not lack of enough evidence. The third part is about the violation or flouting of themaxim of relevance. The maxim of relevance requires that the utterance of the speakershould be relevant to each other. He should not say something randomly. The fourth partis about the violation or flouting of the maxim of manner. The maxim of manner requiresthat the speaker should pay attention to his way of speaking. He should not saysomething that includes ambiguity or obscurity. The four maxims of principle can help usto understand the humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches better.In chapter three, humor in Zhao’s sketches is studied from the perspective ofRelevance Theory. There are many key elements in the Relevance Theory. These keyelements are important methods in analyzing humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches. The keyelements are cognitive context, ostensive-inferential communication, and contrastbetween optimal relevance and maximal relevance. The elements are used to createhumorous effect. This chapter includes three parts. The first part is about the humor incognitive context. In the discourse of sketch performing the differences in the cognitivecontext between the speaker and the hearer can lead to humorous effect. The second partis about the humor in ostensive-inferential communication. In the discourse ofostensive-inferential communication the hearer does something wrong in inferentialactivity. This can lead to humorous effect. The third part is about the humor on maximalrelevance and optimal relevance. The contrast between the optimal relevance in thespeaker’s utterance and the maximal relevance the hearer forms in the discourse of sketchcan also lead to humorous effect. Just like the Cooperative Principle the RelevanceTheory can also help us to understand the humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches better.In chapter four, humor is studied from the points of view of two theories based onchapter two and chapter three. This chapter includes three parts. In the first partCooperative Principle and Relevance Theory are employed together to analyze humor inZhao Benshan’s sketches. Although they have different emphasis, they can both be usedto analyze humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches. The first part analyzes humor in ZhaoBenshan’s sketches from four categories of phonetics, semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric.The second part analyzes and studies humor which can not be explained by eitherCooperative Principle or Relevance Theory. When there is no relevance between the utterances, the Relevance Theory will be unable to analyze the humor in this case. TheCooperative Principle can not explain the humor which is caused by differences incognitive context. It can not explain the humor which is caused by the wrong inferenceby the hearer in the discourse of ostensive-inferential communication. Based on the studyand research above the author comes to a conclusion and the conclusion is that both thetwo theories have their limitations and only we combine the two theories to analyzehumor can we fully understand it quite well.The third part concludes the whole thesis by summarizing the key ideas of the thesis,highlighting its possible contributions to pragmatic research of humor as well as itslimitations. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part is about the summary ofthe devotion made by the author. The second part is about the limitations of the thesis.The first limitation is that there is not enough information. Besides the sketchesperformed on the stage of the Spring Festival Meeting Gala, there are many other ZhaoBenshan’s sketches which are worth studying and analyzing. The second limitation is thatbesides the verbal humor there are many other forms of humor which are worth studying,such as the humor caused by body language. The third limitation is that besides the twoimportant theories there are also many theories which are able to analyze humor in ZhaoBenshan’s sketches. The third part is about the suggestions for future research. The firstsuggestion is that future research should focus on humor besides the humor in verballanguage, such as humor caused by body language. The second suggestion is that moretheories should be used to analyze and study humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches.