An Adaptation Study On The Verbal Humor In Kaixin Mahua Sketches

Verbal humor,as a common language phenomenon,plays an important role in interpersonal communication.Proper verbal humor can not only make people laugh,but also transmit verbal information and communicative intention.As a charismatic language phenomenon,verbal humor has been widely used in the creation of comic sketches.Kaixin Mahua sketches are popular among wide audiences with the witty and humorous utterances.As for the reasons for the success of Kaixin Mahua sketches,the application of verbal humor in the sketch lines is an indispensable factor.Researches at home and abroad have been done on verbal humor from the semantic,pragmatic,cognitive perspectives,but the adaptation process of verbal humor in communication needs to be further researched.On the foundation of the pragmatic perspective,Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory lays stress on observing the use of language comprehensively by taking cognition,society and culture into considerations,which provides a new resolution for interpreting verbal humor.Based on the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory,the thesis gives a thorough analysis of the adaptation process of verbal humor in communication in the example of ten Kaixin Mahua sketches performed in the Spring Festival Gala in some TV stations from the year2012 to 2015.The study attempts to answer two questions:(1)What verbal strategies are used in linguistic structure of Kaixin Mahua sketches to make adaptation to humor?(2)How does the verbal humor in Kaixin Mahua sketches adapt to communicative context?The thesis gives a careful exploration of the adaptation process of verbal humor in Kaixin Mahua sketches from the two aspects of linguistic structure and communicative context,we conclude that the production and interpretation process of the verbal humor in Kaixin Mahua sketches is a dynamic adaptation process.Research findings can be summarized as follows.(1)Adaptation to humor is realized through verbal strategies at phonetic,lexical and syntactic levels.The phonetic devices mainly include tone of northeast dialect,homophone,phonetic pause and rhyme.The lexical devices include irregular split and merge in word forms,indiscriminate use of word and ambiguity in word meaning.Thesyntactic devices include inverted sequence in word order,parody in sentence pattern,repetition in sentence pattern and ambiguity in negation.All these choices of verbal strategies attribute to the successful expression of the verbal humor in Kaixin Mahua sketches.(2)The verbal humor can be produced by adapting to communicative context.Communicative context adaptability includes the dimensions of time and space in the physical world,the audience’s cognitive psychology and emotional needs in the mental world,and social values,mass culture and social life style in the social world.This study has helped to expand the research field of Adaptation Theory and provide a new perspective for verbal humor research in the future.What’s more,the study can provide guidance for the art workers to create more better sketches.