An Analysis Of English Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Memetics

Humor plays an important role in our daily life.Humor has been extensively studied in many different fields for a long time,such as physiology,psychology,literature,aesthetics,philosophy,anthropology,and sociology.Not until the late 20th century,it has been studied with the ideas of linguistics.Later,linguistics begins to do research about humor from the aspect of pragmatics,semantics,and syntax.But there is not a lot of research about verbal humor from memetics perspective.So,in this thesis,the author takes the American sit-com,Friends,as a research target,and systematically analysizes the verbal humor,trying to explain the features and generation mechanism of verbal humor from the perspective of language memetic theory.The thesis tries to answer three questions in this thesis:What is the connection between language meme and English verbal humor?How is English verbal humor produced from the perspective of language memetics in Friends?What functions does English verbal humor with language meme have in Friends?Firstly,the thesis reviews the study of humor and memetics,trying to find the relations between verbal humor and memetics.Then,the thesis studies the generation mechanism and features of verbal humor from the perspective of language memetics.The author takes Friends as a research target and uses qualitative method to do the research.Friends has 10 seasons and 232 episodes.The thesis collects around 110 verbal humors with language memes in the show,and there are 32 verbal humors from the first three seasons.At last,the thesis chooses 20 appropriate examples for the research,and most of them are from the first three seasons.All these examples can be devided into memetic genotype and memetic phenotype according to the former memetic studies.Last,the thesis will also use these verbal humors to talk about the functions of verbal humor with language memes.In this research,the thesis finds out the relarions between langauge meme and verbal humor.During the process of language meme replication and transmission,the original memes will produce new memes,and these are also called the language meme variants.The language meme variants are important for creating humors,and the verbal humors with language memes can help with the meme replication and transmission by enhancing the language meme or turning weak memes into strong memes.Also,by analyzing the verbal humors in Friends from memetic genotype and memetic phenotype,the thesis finds out the generation mechanism of English verbal humor,which turns out the humorous effect is generated by the disharmony between default meme and meme variant during meme replication and transmission.Last,the thesis finds out three functions of verbal humor with language meme,namely entertaining and activating atmosphere,improving communication and relationship,and transmitting cultural genes.By analyzing the verbal humor in Friends from memetics,this thesis extends the scope to analyze and elaborate the specific language examples from memetics.In the other way,it diversifies the theoretical analysis for verbal humor and other language phenomena.However,since the memetic research on verbal humor are few and inadequate,and research on English verbal humor from the perspective of language meme are even less,there are limitations of this study.There are a lot of things to study with verbal humor and language meme.In the future,scholars can keep focusing on empirical studies from other linguistic aspects or other fields to enrich the memtic theory from width and depth and practical use.