A Comparative Study Of Verbal Humor In Sino-America Sitcoms From The Perspective Of High And Low Context Culture

Sitcoms,as an indispensable cultural form of modern entertainment life,have become a window for understanding other countries.In order to appreciate other countries’ outstanding cultural works better,this paper compares two widely circulated sitcom works of China and the United States from the high and low context perspective,analyzing verbal humors in those two works,and then explores the reasons for the different verbal humor expressions between high and low context culture.The special phenomena are presented,and next the tendency of verbal humor expressions under the high context and low context culture is displayed.The corpus of this paper is from the American sitcom Friends and the Chinese sitcom Home with Kids,and the first ten episodes of the first season of the two works are selected for specific analysis.This paper is mainly divided into six parts.The first part introduces the research background,purpose and structure of the two works.The second part is the literature review,including the domestic and foreign researches on high and low context and verbal humor.The third part is the theoretical framework of high and low context and the functions of verbal humor,and the fourth part is the main body of the paper.By comparing the two works,differences of verbal humor are illustrated,and then the reasons for the formation of high and low context culture,such as historical,social and religious reasons,are explored.The fifth part is the dynamic change of verbal humor expressions under high and low context culture in those two works.The sixth part is the conclusion.Starting with the definition of high and low context theory,this paper uses the method of comparative analysis to draw the following conclusions:(1)the performances of the two plays are different in cross-cultural communication.As China is a high-context country,it is more inclined to express verbal humors in an indirect way,and what is more important is implicated.(2)As a low-context country,the United States tends to express verbal humors in a direct way and is also influenced by the historical,social and religious reasons.(3)Communication is a dynamic process,so there is a dynamic change in the process of communication.There are differences between China’s high-context culture and America’s low-context culture,but that does not mean they are completely opposite.In the increasingly frequent intercultural communication,the characteristics of verbal humor of high-context cultural background are shown in the communicators of low-context cultural background,and the communicators of low-context cultural background adopt the expression of high-context cultural verbal humor at the same time.The border of verbal humor expression is relatively vague.The significance of this research is to understand the cultural differences between high and low contexts and their causes,which is conducive to the mutual communication.absorption and integration between two cultures,so that both sides have a certain sense of communication and develop the cultural sensitivity.