A Pragmatic Study Of Humor In Chinese And American Sitcoms-a Cross-culture Perspective

In our daily life, humor does not just act as one kind of common phenomenonbut also plays a vital role in communication. It can enhance the personal relationshipand represent individual wisdom, charm and education level. Scholars have neverstopped studying on humor. In the late1980s, with the development of pragmatics, anincreasing number of scholars began to study verbal humor from the perspective ofpragmatics. As one of the successful carriers, sitcom provides abundant materials forthe pragmatic study of verbal humor.Based on the summary of previous studies related to humor, this paper appliesmany theories from the point of pragmatic, which including the cooperative principle,politeness principle and speech act theory. Through a comparative study related toplenty of verbal humor in two series of typical sitcom of America and China, i.e. TheBig Bang Theory and The Love Apartment, this paper aims to reveal the mechanismof verbal humor and provides efficient advices of getting better understanding of theverbal humor in sitcoms for readers.By combining qualitative and quantitative, this paper draws more than100pieces of verbal humor from two series of sitcom as corpus. Then after induction andclassification, the analysis targeted on typical verbal humor through multiplepragmatic theories has been done. Based on the method of quantitative analysis, thispaper also makes contrastive analysis of all those verbal humor according to all kindsof pragmatic principles. This paper analyzes the differences and similarities of verbalhumor in American and Chinese sitcoms from the view of cross-culture.Through analysis, this paper explores the reason why people from differentcountries fail to understand the verbal humor in sitcoms gradually. Weak languagecompetence, unfamiliar with the slang in English, idiomatic usage, figure of speechand so on, incomprehension of other countries’ history, social background, customsand other cultural factors all account for the reason. While the cultural-context factordefinitely is the major reason. After the contrastive analysis the author puts forward constructive advices forcross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching. In the process of foreignlanguage teaching, teachers should not only develop students’ language competence,but also pay more attention to the popularization and learning of cultural background.Through this way, students could deepen their understanding of foreign language andapply their knowledge to practical use.