A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Verbal Humor In Friends And Love Apartment From The Cross-cultural Perspective

As the material and spiritual civilization level is increasing day by day, the needs for humor are growing with each passing day. Verbal humor has gradually become the indispensable part for English and Chinese in their life. As a kind of important communication mode, verbal humor constantly expands the research field from literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology and other point of view. Verbal humor has also been an important topic concerned by linguistics. There is a large amount of research on humor from the perspective of linguistics, pragmatics, and psychology. Compared with numerous researches on humor, the study of humor from cross-cultural perspective is slightly insufficient, and comparing the verbal humor of American sitcom Friends and Chinese sitcom Love Apartment is still a relatively new subject in this field. Therefore, this thesis aims to study the effect of verbal humor from social and cultural factors and help people to have a good understanding of verbal humor.Humor is a special branch of comedy, which aims to cause readers or audience to laugh by the cheerful language. Sometimes, the same funny situation is neither interesting nor funny for the people coming from different cultures. This shows verbal humor in different nation is disharmonious, and often has different styles. However, from the development tendency of current and contemporary humor we can see that there exists unchangeable disharmony as well as the tendency of approaching each other and mutual exchange in the eastern and western humor. On the basis of verbal humor studies at home and abroad, this thesis takes such theories as Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory as the theoretical foundation, and adopts Friends and Love Apartment as research objects. It also uses Contrastive Analysis to compare and analyze generation and understanding of the humorous conversation to discover the process of communication in both English and Chinese verbal humor in the trend of the formation and to understand humor in different contexts, languages and cultures so as to guide people to appreciate as well as using verbal humor in a better way.The thesis makes a systematic comparative study of humor in the unfailing American sitcom Friends and recent popular Chinese sitcom Love Apartment with pragmatics theories. The research includes:first, it explains the generation of humor by the theory of pragmatics from analysis of Friends and Love Apartment, and searches for convergence of humor formation mechanism and understands humor in the different contexts. Therefore, the author takes random corpus from the Friends and Love Apartment, and makes classification, comparison and analysis on basis of them. The thesis finds that there are many factors of culture and context such as history, thinking mode, values and so on, which affect their understanding of humor for audience coming from different cultural background. Second, it concludes that there are some differences between English and Chinese verbal humor in means of expression forms, topics, joking occasions joking targets and humor style by analyzing Friends and Love Apartment, an objective analysis is made to clarify the misunderstanding of Love Apartment.