The Relevance Theory Interpretation Of Humor In Sitcom Of The Big Bang Theory

With the frequency of culture communication between China and the western world and the rapid development of Internet, more and more foreign sitcoms come into Chinese’s sight and are welcomed by the audiences. One of the representative works is American sitcom The Big Bang Theory with rich characteristics, vivid language, unexpected dialogues and fashionable lines. The success of the sitcom mainly lies in humorous language. This thesis bases on Relevance Theory to analyze the production and understanding of the humor in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of cognition.Relevance Theory is firstly put forward by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson in 1986. The Relevance Theory presents two kinds of relevance—maximal relevance and optimal relevance, with the difference between them as an important part of it. And the Relevance theory also presents two principles—cognitive principle(i.e., human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance) and communicative principle(i.e., every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance). And the concepts of Relevance Theory, such as ostensive-inferential communication model and dynamic context, also support the explanatory of this theory.In this thesis, the concepts of humor and three traditional theories on humor are firstly introduced and then Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory are stated in detail. In the next part, it is the methodology of the paper, including the study material and data. The body part carefully analyzes the humor lines in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of Relevance Theory, which demonstrates the strong explanatory power to explore the mechanism of humor and cognition process. The main research questions can be summarized as follows: the first research question is how the humorous effect is produced in The Big Bang Theory; the second research question is what the cognitive procedures are when the audience tries to understand the humor utterance; the last one is the factors hind the understanding of humor.This thesis pays its attention on the understanding mechanism of humor and the factors hindering the understanding of humor and tries its best to evoke the notice of language learners. It hopes that it can attract learners’ interest on appreciation of humor and deepen the understanding of western culture for English learners, which can have a better understanding on English language and improve the language application ability. In addition, teachers can take full advantage of humor language to cultivate the interest of the students and improve their English level.