A Study On Verbal Humor In Friends From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

Verbal humor,a main form of humor,is such a pervasive linguistic phenomenon that it almost exits in all aspects of people’s life.It has been studied by a large number of scholars in different academic fields since ancient Greece.With the development of linguistics,scholars in the modern linguistics are becoming more and more interested in verbal humor as well and attempt to explore humor from different linguistic perspectives.Generally,there are three main linguistic perspectives adopted to carry out the research on verbal humor: semantics,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.These studies have made plentiful outcomes and significant achievements.However,the study on humor from the perspective of intertextuality has been left scarcely touched even though intertextuality is considered as a universal feature of texts.Such consideration pushes the present study to investigate verbal humor from the perspective of intertextuality.For it is a famous American sitcom featured with much humorous language in daily life,Friends is chosen as the case for the study,in which both quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed aiming to summarize the intertextual forms leading to verbal humor in Friends and analyze how the intertextual relationship works in the process of the production of humor.The video version and the script version of Friends are from the Internet.In the study,Random Generator software is used to select three episodes randomly from each season,a total of thirty episodes as the research data,which can guarantee the objectivity of the study and the reliability of the sample data.Through the statistical data and based on the typology of intertextuality presented by Hatim and Mason in 2001 as well as Xin Bin in 2000,it is concluded that there are two broad categories of intertextuality in the generation of verbal humor in Friends: microscopic intertextual forms and macroscopic intertextual forms.The former has six subcategories: reference,quotation,allusion,proverb,cliché and parody;the latter has four subcategories: generic intertextuality,functional intertextuality,structural intertextuality and thematic intertextuality.Through analyzing and discussing the typical examples of each intertextual form,it can be concluded that the proper use of intertextual forms can give rise to humorous effects successfully.To some extent,the present study brings much benefit to people in comprehending verbal humor better both intraculturally and interculturally,enlightensplaywrights to produce more attractive sitcoms by employing intertextual strategies and expands the scope of application of intertextuality to the field of cross-cultural communication.