A Study Of Verbal Humor In Chinese Sitcom From Perspective Of Language Meme

Verbal humor, as a charming language phenomenon, has drawn wide attention ofmany scholars in different disciplines like psychology, physiology, cognitivelinguistics and pragmatics etc. Sitcom, as a main artistic form of conveying humor, isvery popular with the audiences. Until now, numerous studies of verbal humor insitcoms have been conducted from the perspective of stylistics, receptive aesthetics,pragmatics etc. Most studies are confined to the textual characteristics and functionsof verbal humor in sitcoms, but the generation mechanism of verbal humor has notbeen expounded profoundly. However, the exploration of generation mechanism ofverbal humor is of great importance to enhance artistic techniques of sitcoms as wellas the audiences’ artistic appreciation. Therefore, the thesis attempts to analyze thedynamic generation mechanism of verbal humor in terms of the speaker and thehearer from the perspective of language meme by taking My Own Swordsman(representative of the climax of Chinese sitcom) as the data source. Moreover, thethesis also puts forward some strategies to create humorous lines.The humorous utterances of My Own Swordsman discussed and recommendedby the net citizens in Bai Du and Google are marked, from which190classicalhumorous utterances are picked out. Among190humorous utterances,131onescontaining language meme are chosen as the data source. Through detailed analysis of131humorous utterances in My Own Swordsman, the thesis has attained findings asfollows:The language memes in humorous utterances of My Own Swordsman possesstwo features. One feature lies in their vitality. These language memes are not onlyfamiliar to the audiences in terms of form and content but also in accordance with theaudiences’ psychological needs and social cultural background. The other is thefeature of variability. In order to realize the intention of amusing the audiences, thespeaker often adapts the language meme according to the rule of similarity andproximity.And the adapted language meme is disharmonious with the default context of the original language meme from phonetic, lexical, syntactic and discourseaspects. When the audiences comprehend these humorous utterances containinglanguage memes, the default context embedded in language memes will be triggeredeasily with the aids of familiar form or content of language memes. Once theaudiences realize the incongruity between the default context and new context oflanguage memes with regard to their form, content, emotional coloring, genre etc. Ifthe audiences can take the current communicative context and the speaker’scommunicative attitude into consideration, the disharmony will be resolved andhumorous effect will be achieved spontaneously.From the above analysis of the dynamic process of humor production andcomprehension, we find that the imitation of language memes contributes a lot tohumor production and understanding. Therefore, in order to enhance artistictechniques of Chinese sitcoms, the thesis puts forward the implicit imitation strategyand the explicit imitation strategy: the former refers to the imitation of informationconcealed in language memes like the audiences’ existing schemes of knowledge,psychological needs and social and cultural environment while the latter means theimitation, reorganization or displacement of the extrinsic linguistic forms of languagememes. Only by realizing ideal integration of language memes in terms of intrinsicand extrinsic forms can the audiences be activated to understand its humorous effectthrough figuring out disharmony between the default context and the new context oflanguage meme.