A Study On Verbal Humor In American Sitcom From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Verbal humor is an art of language with unique appeal and charm, and it is also a goodway of communication. With many scholars’continuous study, people find that humor can notbe adequately explained just by analyzing language itself. Thus, this thesis studies thecognitive process of verbal humor comprehension in the American sitcom The Big BangTheory from the perspective of Relevance Theory. It aims to explore the cognitive mechanismof humor comprehension and tries to discover the techniques that often used to contribute torealizing humorous effects so that we can interpret verbal humors better.The realization of verbal humor should be considered as a cognitive process instead ofjust being limited to the classic code model. Sperber and Wilson proposed the RelevanceTheory which illustrates human communication from the perspective of cognition. It claimsthat we can explain how the audiences finally get the communicator’s real intention on thebasis of relevance. Sitcoms can provide plenty of materials for humor study. The Big BangTheory has become one of the most popular American sitcoms for its distinct language featureand abundant amusing humors. This thesis mainly adopts the qualitative research method. Thedata sources are from a case study, in which30episodes of the sitcom The Big Bang Theoryare randomly selected from the first season to the fifth season. Various verbal humors areanalyzed in the framework of the Relevance Theory. Based on the analysis, the authorconcludes the general cognitive mechanism of verbal humor comprehension.Meanwhile, the author makes a simple linguistic statistics of the verbal humors mainlyfrom the perspectives of phonology, semantics, pragmatics and rhetorics to further classify thetechniques that contribute to verbal humors and find out which are often employed. As aresult, the techniques of homophone, homonym, polysemy, ambiguity, semantic pun, suspenseof background, deliberate twisting the context, failure to match the assumptions, metaphor,hyperbole and irony are used. Among them, the frequencies of pragmatic and rhetoricaltechniques are higher than others, and they play an important role in producing humorouseffects.The present research is an application of Relevance Theory to humor study. It has boththeoretical and practical significance. The study not only provides a broader point of view forthe further study on verbal humor in the future, but also can help people understand andappreciate humors better and motivate students to learn English through sitcoms.