A Study On The Role Of Domestic Situational Comedy In Cultural Transmission

In1993, Director YingDa successfully had I Love My Family, the first situation comedy the true sense in China, shown on TV, which marked this TV art expression form derived from the America was successfully introduced into China. After20years of development, situation comedies in China have experienced ups and downs before making great successes ultimately. At present, the shows of My Own Swordsman, Home with Kids, Ipartment season and a large number of other sitcoms have been playing on many mainstream television channels successively in prime-time, and the situation comedy type has become an indispensable form of drama with a wide audience attracted at the same time. However, varying works qualities and other problems risen from different qualities of makers, increasingly extensive choices of creative themes and other reasons come as follow, resulting in some hidden trouble while the influence index of the situation comedies increasing dramatically in the cultural communication.By review of literature, I think the study on situation comedies in China is still in its infancy and there are not enough articles related to the study. The existing studies mostly focus on narrative techniques, language strategies and development directions, but there is almost no research related to the influence of situation comedies on culture communication. Following the development of China’s situation comedies closely and based on reference to relevant literature on Chinese situation comedies, this paper aims to analyze the relationship between situation comedies and culture communication in China as well as negative and positive realistic effects of sitcoms on culture communication with a dialectical point of view by summarizing typical representative works and thinking about the current development situation of Chinese situation comedies, so as to put forward some suggestions on making Chinese situation comedies play a more positive role in promoting culture communication by focusing on how to maximize strengths whilst minimizing weaknesses.This paper consists of five parts:the first part systematically expounds the situation comedies concept by starting from the situation comedies definitions made by well-known scholars both at home and abroad, analyzes the recent sitcom features from the scene, character, structure, dramatic and other aspects, and divides the development of situation comedies into3important historical phases---the beginning, the exploration and the prosper in combination with the origin and the development of situation comedies; the second part clarifies the role of situation comedies in culture communication and the relationship between the two in China by studying the culture communication functions that situation comedies carry by starting from the basic concept of culture communication; the third part expounds in detail the main cultural elements carried and spread by situation comedies in China based on the qualitative analysis and comparison of examples in3aspects including spreading the local traditional culture, spreading the regional culture and spreading the network culture; the fourth part cooperatively points out situation comedies ’three major negative effects of "pan-entertainment","vulgarization" and "plagiarism" on culture communication at present in China from the two aspects of the causes and manifestations respectively; the fifth part, as the focus of the paper, puts forward some suggestions such as "seizing the key links to enhance the profound degree and reflection of contents","strictly controlling examination and approval with attention to objectivity and effectiveness of supervision and verification","using plagiarism with caution to promote the program’s originality and applicability" on how to cope with the negative impacts of situation comedies on culture communication, and other suggestions such as "taking advantage of the emerging media means to open up broader transmission routes","breaking the foreign bonds on thinking to create richer contents and forms","understanding the audience’s attention to accumulate wider audience" on how to make situation comedies play a more positive role in culture communication.