A Comparative Study Of Humor In American Sitcom Friends And Chinese Sitcom The Love Apartment From The Perspective Of Register Deviation

As a unique ability and special way of communication, humor is pervasive in ourlife. Through the ages, a great many scholars has studied humor from variousdisciplines, including linguistics, rhetorics, esthetics, philosophy, sociology,cross-cultural study, language translation, etc. The linguistic studies on humor usuallycover discourse analysis, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and so on, which hasachieved abundant accomplishments. This thesis adopts register deviation theory to do acomparative study of verbal humor in American sitcom and Chinese sitcom.Sitcoms are the main manifestation of humor, which is more and more popular withpeople. Friends and The Love Apartment are respectively the representatives of thewestern sitcom and Chinese sitcom, both of which tell a story of several young peopleliving in the city. This thesis comparatively studies the generative mechanism of verbalhumor to find its similarities and differences in communication.This thesis adopts the qualitative, quantitative and comparative analytical methodsto study verbal humor in sitcoms based on different themes and different social relations.It mainly answers two questions. First, which type of register deviation is presentedmore frequently in producing humor in the English and Chinese sitcoms? Second, howdoes the cultural context function in humor appreciation? Through analyzing a certainamount of linguistic material, this thesis confirms that register deviation can createhumorous phenomena in both American sitcoms and Chinese sitcoms. Choosing whatkind of register deviation type depends on the immediate environment. Audience withdifferent cultural backgrounds have different understanding of humor, sometimes evencannot comprehend humors in other cultures. These cultural factors include customs,habits, histories and values etc.This study on humor in the sitcoms Friends and The Love Apartment has boththeoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, by a comparative analysis of themechanism of verbal humor in both English and Chinese language, the correspondingtheoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed, enriching the existing theoriesof humor study. The practical significance is that mastering the mechanism of humor and the cultural elements behind humor appreciation will be of some help in the studyof humorous language and in improving our cross-cultural communication.