| Humor is specific to human beings. As one of Chinese traditional arts, cross talk is one of the cultural treasures in China which employs humorous ways to reflect the social reality. "Package" is a significant carrier of humorous effect in cross talks. Nevertheless, owing to the difference of language and the lack of cultural background knowledge, people from other countries know little about Chinese cross talk.Relevance theory was first put forward by Sperber and Wilson in their book Relevance:communication and cognition in 1986. Since then, relevance theory has been widely applied to the researches in different domains, including humor research. But there are only a few researches on the humor art with typical Chinese characteristic, cross talk and even fewer on its carrier, "package". Therefore, the author attempts to make an elucidation on the design techniques and constructing processes of "package" as well as the comprehension mechanism of the production of humorous effect by way of exemplification. The present study shows that the contrast between maximal relevance and optimal relevance can act as a trigger of humor. From this point, the author finds that humorous effect produced by the design techniques "distract" and "dig" can be explained. Contextual effect is inversely proportional to processing effort which means the weaker the contextual effect is, the more processing effort is needed to process the information and this is the reason why "unfold" the package can produce humorous effect. More processing efforts result in stronger humorous experience, and the audience will get more laughter. What’s more, the author proposes three strategies to create humor based on Francisco Yus’"Humor and the search for relevance". They are language strategy, assumption analysis strategy and implicature strategy.This paper aims to study the humor of "package" of Chinese cross talk based on an analysis of the "packages" selected from the excellent cross talk texts presented in the last two decades in the framework of Relevance Theory. The author hopes to find out the reasons why the "package" can amuse people and the effective pragmatic strategies to make up a "package", thus enrich the study of humor of "package" and help to carry out the China’s cultural policy of "going out" which will help the world have a better understanding of the Chinese culture. |
