| Humorous language, as the main form to express humor, pervades our lives. It exists in almost every part of the world. Explanations and studies of humor can be traced back to the early Greeks, from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant to Freud, a history probably as long as that of culture. Humor is observable in many aspects of life. It has been studied from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint, including fields like linguistics, rhetoric, esthetics, philosophy, sociology, etc.Humorous language has obvious pragmatic characteristics, because it is usually expressed in the form of conversations in daily life. We can find that there are lots of humorous conversations frequently taken as examples for pragmatic analysis or studies in diverse books and articles concerning pragmatics. Therefore, it is evident that there exists close relationship between humor and pragmatics. Some humorous language often reveals one or more pragmatic features.Situation comedy or sitcom is a genre of comedy performance. The humor in sitcom has its own characteristics. Although humor has received enough attention, but the linguistic studies on humor in sitcom are still somewhat limited within the field of discourse analysis, language translation and cross-cultural study, etc. The pragmatic comparative study of humor in American sitcom Friends and Chinese sitcom ILMF is still a new topic in the research field.The thesis presents a comparative study of humor in Friends and ILMF from the perspective of pragmatics, with the hope of finding the similarities in humor production and appreciating humor between the two languages. Some of the major theories, namely, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Context theory are applied to study the production and appreciation of humor. The main aim is to address the following research questions. Firstly, how can we explain the creation of humor in the specific context—sitcom within the framework of pragmatics, especially to find what similarities are in the humor production and how to appreciate humor between Friends and ILMF? To address this question, a pragmatic comparative study of humorous effect in the humor cases taken from the sitcoms Friends and ILMF is presented. Secondly, how can we account for humor appreciation failures of English and Chinese? Meanwhile, through the comparative study, some contextual factors, especially the cultural context factors, are revealed. These contexual fators have great impact on the appreciation of humor. People coming from different cultures usually possess different customs, history, values, beliefs, etc. Thus, because of the inaccessibility of certain culture-specific contextual assumptions due to the great differences between Chinese culture and American culture, both audience sometimes cannot catch the humor intended so that they cannot get the pleasure and consequently, fail to appreciate the humor the humorist intends to convey.This study on humor in the sitcoms Friends and ILMF has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, although the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor production and appreciation has been used for a few years, this generalized theoretical explanation of the mechanism of humor is seldom utilized in the study of humor contexts of different languages and has seldom been testified. So by applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor to the specific context—sitcoms in both English and Chinese language, the corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed. The second theoretical significance is that the thesis provides the analysis with the explanation of humor appreciation failures in a cross-cultural context so that it will further extend the boundary of applicability of pragmatic theories to the area of cross-cultural communication. The practical significance is that mastering the mechanism of humor and the cultural elements behind humor appreciation will be of some help in the study of the language of humor, cross-cultural communication and language teaching and learning.
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