An Adaptive Study On Humor In The TV Series Men

Nowadays, different kinds of TV series, which become an indispensible sack after dinner, are rich in everyday life. The author prefers to the TV series with hot topics, because the story ending is always open, which gives the audience more room to think over. Zhao Baogang’s works are very popular with the audience. Men is one of his typical works. In addition, humor plays an important role in most of his works. Humorous and ridiculous dialogues make people laugh and relaxed. However, behind humor and laugh, life philosophy will be revealed at last.At present, the studies on humor are not enough, especially on TV series, most of which are based on Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson, cooperative principles and conversational implicatures by H.P Grice. This thesis makes a detailed analysis of humorous dialogues and expressive forms with humor in Men based on Adaptation Theory. It mainly probes to how to make linguistic choices and how to choose strategies in the process of humor generation. First, from the angle of structural objects of adaptability, the thesis makes an analysis of linguistic choice-making, and strategies chosen at sound level, lexical level, syntactical level and suprasentential level. Second, from the angle of adaptability to communicative context, the thesis focuses on the humorous language and ways chosen by the characters in Men in order to adapt to mental world(personality, emotion, motivation, desire, and belief), social world(social settings, interpersonal relationships, culture, and profession), and physical world(time and space). Finally, this thesis concludes that humor generation is the result that characters make proper linguistic choices on the condition of adapting to some linguistic structure and certain communicative context. This thesis is a practical application to Chinese materials, which tests and justifies the explanatory power of Adaptation Theory for humor, especially for the dialogues in TV series. Therefore, it is helpful for analyzing and understanding the plots and characters of TV series, even for our communication in daily life.