A Study Of Humorous Rhetoric In Huang Zihua’s Stand-up Comedy

“Dongduxiao” as a theater-type single-stage performing art of language, coming from"Stand-up Comedy" in North America, was introduced from the western society to Hong Kongby the Hong Kong actor Huang Zihua in1990. Overall, Huang Zihua’s stand-up comediesinclude the themes of irony of reality, self-mockery, the presentation of the absurdity, exquisiteinterpretation to things. Stand-up comedy is a performing art achieving the effect of rhetoricmainly by language. In order to achieve the preset rhetorical effect, performers use all sorts ofrhetorical devices, including phonetic rhetoric, vocabulary rhetoric and syntactic rhetoric. Alarge part of the charm of stand-up comedy due to the interpretation of the Cantonese dialect, soit is particularly important to phonetic rhetoric, and performers also put special emphasis onusing homophonic to implement rhetorical functions of twist, pun, antanaclasis, contrast andmalapropism.The common social culture of performers and audience generates the context ofHuang Zihua’s stand-up comedy. Features of Hong Kong culture, senses of not belonging,senses of powerlessness, senses of unnecessary, also reflected in Huang Zihua’s show incisivelyand vividly. Dialect expression gives a strong vitality and rich features to the stand-up comedy,but also makes its narrow audience. How to deal with the relationship between restriction anddevelopment is still worth thinking about.In this paper, we chose eleven single shows to corpus analysis from Huang Zihua’sstand-up comedy performances since1990, collated and analyzed the whole content andlanguage skills of Huang Zihua’s stand-up comedy by the instruction of linguistics and rhetorictheory, to explore the connotation of social culture in Hong Kong reflected in Huang Zihua’sstand-up comedy, and finally, discussed the constraints and challenges existing in thedevelopment of the performing art about positive and negative impact on Huang Zihua’sstand-up comedy by dialect performance.