A Study Of Humor With Nonverbal Expressions In Chinese Skits Based On Incongruity Theory

The use and interpretation of humor is a complex and intriguing aspect of human behavior. Humor itself is a unique human phenomenon which involves both verbal language and nonverbal expressions. According to its source, it can be generally divided into two categories:linguistic humor (verbal humor) and situational humor. Ever since the ancient times,"the mechanism of humor production" has been the focus of humor study. There have been many classical theories concerning humor, such as the incongruity theory, the superiority theory, the relief theory and so on. Among these theories, the incongruity theory takes the dominant position and reckons that the cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and the laughter itself is just an expression of this incongruity.As a kind of folk art indigenous to China, skits or sketches enjoy immense popularity among Chinese. Rooting nutrients from daily life, these skits works make full use of both verbal language and nonverbal expressions to produce humor and thus entertain and cultivate people. With the emergence and development of basic theories of linguistics, scholars began to make use of some of them to explain the mechanism of humor production in skits, such as deixis, presupposition, relevance theory and principles of cooperation. Nonverbal aspects in skits, however, have seldom been taken into consideration while analyzing the generation of humor. Theoretically based on the incongruity theory, the thesis tends to make a tentative exploration on the phenomenon of humor with nonverbal expressions in Chinese skits.To facilitate the study, it is quite necessary to make clear the categories and the functions of nonverbal expressions. The author has read a lot of literature and tends to group nonverbal expressions into the following four categories based on the previous studies:body language, paralanguage, object language and environmental language, which perform the functions of repeating, complementing, substituting, regulating, reinforcing and contradicting in the process of communication. With all these functions performed, nonverbal expressions play a vital and irreplaceable role in the process of human communication and production of humor.Under the direction of the theory of incongruity, the present study intends to make a tentative exploration on the comprehension analysis of nonverbal-expression-oriented humor based on a case study of the production of humor in a skit. A brick is to be cast to attract jade in terms of study on humor, pragmatics and Chinese skits.