| Language is a medium for human communication, and humor is deemed as a distinctive feature of speech. Humor, a product of linguistically mental operation with rich cultural connotations, has a wide application range. The core of humor lies in expressing the conventional contents through hyper-conventional forms or using the normal form to show hyper-normal contents. With the rapid development of linguistics during the 20th century, especially the progressive construction of context theory, surely it has proved that the role context plays in the production and interpretation of humor is no less important than it is in other linguistic fields. This is the exact reason that the present study assumes to study humor from the contextual perspective.Stand-up comedy is considered as a form of performing art, and as such the interaction between the host and audience, serving as a rich corpus for interpersonal and interactional analysis from a pragmatic perspective. Based on the previous studies, this paper draws examples from Mr. Zhou’s Live Show and Joe Wong’s Stand-up Comedy to re-examine verbal humor on contextual dimensions. By breaking through the traditional pragmatic approaches, the current paper aims to introduce a novel conception, namely "contextual dimension". Specifically, it is intended to add to traditional humor theories a context emphasis, namely, four contextual dimensions as its theoretical framework. The four dimensions, linguistic, physical, temporal and experiential, combining with the examples selected form Joe Wong’s and Mr. Zhou’s Live Show, form a coherent mechanism of producing and interpreting verbal humor, and delve into the function of presupposition proposed in the present thesis. Finally, it is believed that the novel pragmatic paradigm discussed in the present study, with the involvement of context study and humor study, makes a certain contribution to both fields, and hopefully promotes a more effective intercultural communication. |
