A Study Of Verbal Humor In Situational Comedies From The Perspective Of Memetics

In1976, Richard Dawkins, a zoologist of Oxford University first brought out theterm “meme” according to “gene” from Darwin’s evolution theory. According toDawkins’ theory, meme is a unit that can be copied and spreaded. Dawkins believethat, everything that can be widely copied and spread can be called meme whichrefers to many aspects, such as languages, customs, notions, social behaviors, etc.In recent years, memetics has attracted a lot of attention form more and moreresearchers and scholars. Researchers and scholars in many fields try hard to connectmemetics with their own fields in hoping that they can shed some new light on theirstudies. Such as, studies that linked memetics with psychology, education, linguisticsand sociology. In linguistic field, some scholars try to use memetics to analyzevarious language phenomena, for example, short message, catch-words, net-language,public signs, advertisements, loan words and so on.Humor is a kind of special cultural phenomenon which can be heard in daily lifeand on television and film programs, such as, sketch, joke, cross talk, situationcomedy, nonsense, parody, dirty joke, black humor, cold humor, net-humor, picturehumor and so on. Humor possesses many functions in formal and informal occasions.In general, it has four kinds of functions, entertaining function, communicativefunctions, psychological function and cultural function.While, it is clear that studies concerned with humor from the perspective ofmemetics are few and inadequate which is exactly the meaning of the thesis. Takememetics as the theoretical framework, take Friends and Ipartment, two of the mostfamous sitcoms, as study targets, the thesis thoroughly analyzes language meme,meme variation, transmission stages of language memes, types of language memes,verbal humor, the relationship between language meme and verbal humors, thegeneration of humorous affected by copying and transmitting language memes. Bystudying the examples of verbal humor memes in two television programs, the thesisalso discusses the similarities between Chinese and western verbal humors form theperspective of memetics, such as, in the process of generation of humorous effect, thecopying and transmitting stages are alike, functions of verbal humors form theperspective of memetics are alike, the techniques used in generating verbal humorsare alike. Based on the study result, this thesis also discusses the implications of memetics on other fields and subjects like culture, language teaching, cross-culturalcommunication, translation and so on. While, since studies on verbal humor from theperspective of memetics are hard to find and the writer’s knowledge and researchabilities are limited, so, limitations still exists in this thesis and it needs furtherimproving and perfecting. It is hoped that this thesis can provide some usefulsuggestions for future studies in this field.