The Regular Pattern Of Chinese Sitcom Creation

As the fundamental characteristic of sitcom, Comedy can only be shown by designing abundant jokes which not only concerns about the language but also involves characters, narrative, images and many other aspects.As to the skill of joke designing, this paper start with the conception "laugh", discussing the psychological mechanism of laugh, sorting six most representative theories about laugh in history such as Superiority/Belittle Theory, Incongruity/Dissonance Theory, Surprise Theory, Irregularity Theory and Release Theory, and combining with neurocognitive research to analyze the activity of the brain in the process of humor and investigate rules and conditions fo laughing producing.The characters in sitcom are usually distinctive "flat characters", all the main characters are generally positive image with some defects, but these defects mainly from the personality aspects rather than moral character flaws, such as vanity, silly, arrogant, shy, narcissistic, cowardly, stingy, greedy, lazy, unprincipled, gender dislocation, each of which can be found a corresponding case in the sitcom. It is these defects that make the characters have a strong comedy.The conflict in sitcom are usually not strong enough and concentrated, but scattered and incompact. The suspense in sitcom are rarely used because audience need to know the comedy implementation ahead of time which limits the using of suspense. At present, most of the European and American sitcoms are multi-line narrative, while Chinese sitcom use both of single-line and multi-line narrative. Those sitcom with multi-line narrative frequently switch between different clues which are not related to each other. Overall, sitcom's plot is an open structure which make the audience can not know when the story will be ended, but the plot of a single episode is usually closed circular structure. When the story start, the perspective of sitcom is usually on the weak to show his embarrassment, distress, battered to make a comedy effect. In addition, there is a higher frequency plot model in sitcom such as mechanically following the dogma, trying a different approach to solve the problem, standing in a inappropriate position, concealment and deception, misunderstanding, abusing characters and so on. The dialogue in sitcom often deliberately violate the principle of cooperation and politeness in communication to create humor. In addition, euphony, rhyme, misreading, dialect, pun, ambiguity, abnormal demolition of words are frequently used to make jokes.Sitcom also has its own unique rules of the image. Close shot, medium shot, panorama shot are used more than close-up. When the jokes are presenting, there is a reverse angle shot to show the reaction of others. Camera should be placed in best position to present humor. European and American sitcom usually use scenery shot or direct cut rather than close-up for transitions, but Chinese sitcoms use close-up transitions more in recent years. Most of sitcoms use laughter as their background sound rather than music.