Fuzzy Theory-based Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In The Sitcom Two And A Half Men

In Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1981:295), humor ought to includethree layers of meanings: the first one is the quality which appeals to a sense of theludicrous or absurdly incongruous; the second one is the mental faculty of discovering,expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous; the third one is somethingthat is designed to be comical or amusing. Humor is so ubiquitous that it is foundeverywhere in our life. As a distinct and representative means of expression, it isundeniable that humor performs a significant role in verbal communication. A humor aptlyused can not only amuse the listener, but also contribute to establish a harmoniousrelationship with others.Traced back to the Ancient Greece as early as Aristotle times, the prevalence andsignificance of humor has aroused many scholars’ interest over the centuries and humorhas been the research focus of multi-disciplines. Traditional humor studies were limited tophilosophy, aesthetics, sociology and psychology and so on. In1980s, researchers beganto shift their attention to work on humor within the field of linguistics. At present, thelinguistics-based studies on humor have been made from various angles such as semantics,pragmatics and functional linguistics, etc. Nevertheless, it is found that the previousstudies on humor can not well reveal the generative mechanism of humor. In this thesis,the author attempts to account for the production of humor from the perspective of fuzzytheory.Fuzzy Set Theory was put forward by American scholar L. A. Zadeh in1965. Itsessence is that the boundary of the set is unfixed, the elements in the set are themembership of the set, and the boundary of the elements is not confined to0and1but cantake any number between0and1. That is to say, the transition of the elements frommembership to non-membership is gradual rather than abrupt. Along with the proposal of fuzzy theory, a focus on the study of fuzzy language begins to emerge. So far, a number ofscholars have done considerable study concerning the fuzziness in language. Somescholars such as Li Guoying (2007) and Chen Hongju (2006) have applied fuzzy theory tothe study of the phenomenon of fuzziness in news language and legal language, but fewhave carried out the study on fuzziness of verbal humor in sitcoms. The sitcoms are filledwith humorous utterances which offer abundant resources for the exploration of verbalhumor. This thesis chooses the sitcom Two and a Half Men as the research data, makes atentative analysis of verbal humor with fuzzy theory and sees how verbal humor in thesitcom Two and a Half Men is generated on the basis of fuzzy theory.The sitcom Two and a Half Men has ten seasons and218episodes in all. The authorchooses the first three seasons and72episodes in which the author selects the humorousutterances followed by ideal audience’s laughter as the corpus. The author eventually hasgathered576humorous examples in this way. Based on a qualitative analysis, it is foundthat:Firstly, the methods by which humor is triggered mainly fall into three categories:phonetic fuzziness, semantic fuzziness and pragmatic fuzziness in light of fuzzy theory. Interms of fuzziness at phonetic level, humorous effect is achieved primarily by theemployment of homophony, liaison and the fuzziness of intonation. Fuzziness at semanticlevel is largely reflected in lexical fuzziness and syntactic fuzziness. The realization ofhumor in lexical aspect is mainly by means of fuzzy words, such as nouns, verbs,pronouns, adjectives and adverbs; the realization of humor in syntactic aspect is mainly bymeans of certain sentence patterns such as offering seemingly unrelated answers, directlyturning the question back to the asker without responding to it or using a sentence with abroader meaning than required. Pragmatic fuzziness produces humor mainly by threeapproaches: conversational implicature, indirect speech act and rhetorical devices. Thehumorous utterances produced by these approaches all have implied meanings.Secondly, the percentage of humor generated by phonetic fuzziness accounts for8.51%, the percentage of humor generated by semantic fuzziness accounts for29%, andthe percentage of humor generated by pragmatic fuzziness accounts for56.6%. Thesefigures show that pragmatic fuzziness occurs more often and is more important incomparison with the other two methods among the three methods applied to generatehumor based on fuzzy theory.