An Intertextual Analysis Of Humor In American Sitcom

This thesis argues that intertextuality is an important means to create humor in American situation comedies. As a pervasive language phenomenon, humor has been in the spotlight of various research fields, and sitcom which features humor is widely favored as the data for the study of humor. For its popularity and wide coverage of common scene and language in daily life, the classical American sitcom Friends is chosen as the case for study in this thesis. On account of theory on intertextuality and context theory, this study constructs a model for intertextual analysis of humor. It aims to show how intertextual resources are appropriately applied in sitcom and how intertextual relation in certain context leads to humor. Xin Bin’s classification of intertextuality into specific intertextuality and generic intertextuality with combination of Fairclough’s standpoint is adopted in data analysis part. The specific intertextual forms involved in this research includes reference, cliche, allusion, quotation and proverb; and generic intertextual forms contains mixture of genres, mixture of discourses and mixture of styles. The significance of this study mainly lies in that it provides a perspective to the study of humor which tries to explain how humorous effect can be achieved in sitcoms through intertextuality, and hopefully it can enlighten the playwrights of sitcoms to apply more intertextual resources properly.