A Comparative Study On The Humor Strategies In Chinese And English Stand-up Comedies

Humor has long enjoyed popularity among scholars of various fields, from sociology to psychology, and from philosophy to linguistics. As a universal linguistic phenomenon and an enjoyable way of communication, it has been playing a significant role in interpersonal communication.With the increasingly frequent intercultural communication, stand-up comedy is introduced to China from the western countries. As a comic style, stand-up comedy has been popular among people of different genders and ages. However, despite the fact that more and more people are adept at speaking a foreign language, there do exist barriers in appreciating the humor of the other language. The hindrance lies largely in the different ways humor is produced in stand-up comedy performances of different cultures.By comparing the similarities and distinctions of humor strategies adopted in English and Chinese stand-up comedies and by analyzing cultural elements, the study aims at finding out the reasons that lead to the barrier of humor appreciation between the two cultures.The similarities of humor strategies are analyzed at macro and micro scales. The macro strategies refer to the ones in violation to communicative principles. According to Grice (1989), humor is connected to the violations of the conversational maxims, i.e. the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner. Therefore a consensus has been built within linguists of humor research that humor violates one or several of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle. In other words, the violation of the CP maxims can be regarded as humor strategies.By micro strategies the study refers to humor achieved at the linguistic level. Both English and Chinese stand-up comedies involve verbal humor realized through word play, making use of the internal features of language. This kind of strategies includes various aspects of language:phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic. English and Chinese stand-up comedies differ in some non-linguistic aspects. These distinctions include the topic choice, joking targets, and different modes of expression, which are caused by different social structures, varied cultural values, and diverse world views.The thesis concludes that the barriers of humor appreciation lie more in the social and cultural disparities rather than the incompetence of the foreign language. The political environment, social structure, social norms and conventions, value system and belief all contribute to the different ways of producing humor and appreciating humor.