Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Motivation of the Study
Verbal humor is a special kind of language and is the reflection of people’s wisdomof linguistic performance. Each time when we feel unhappy, we may choose somethingwith some elements of humor to drive the blue mood away, for example, the comedy. It issuch a strange thing that the bad mood really vanishes into the air after one gets in touchwith humor. This peculiar function of humor is as miraculous as the magic and peopleseldom understand the principles and mechanism behind humor. Therefore, we are eager todiscover thoroughly the humors which help us a lot when we are in low mood and find thatFrame-Shifting Theory fits well in the study of humor, so this theory is chosen to decodethe language of humor.
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1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Study
The purpose of the study is to find out the substantial causes of the effect of verbalhumor, and analyze the psychological processes of the receivers of understanding verbalhumor.As a special kind of linguistic form, humor has many carriers, such as joke, comedy,comic and sitcom. Humor is not only a method that make people feel relaxed freely, butalso a product that can be used to buy or sell laughter. With the rapid development of themodern society, people strongly feel the pressure of the fierce competition and because ofthe mentality of dissatisfaction, laughter seldom appear during their daily lives. This is anindifferent society in which people always present a serious face. As this phenomenonbecomes more and more common, the mission to make people feel relaxed is extremelyurgent. However, some of the humor makers don’t know the principles and mechanismsbehind humor, and they may fail to make their humor well accepted by the audience. Thisstudy will help humor makers and provide some methods for them to create some noveland successful works, like sitcoms, humorous stories and creative funny witticisms, etc.There are two reasons to choose Friends as the research object: First, sitcom, as agenre using exaggerated technique, witty dialogues and vivid portray of characters, iswidely accepted as a special type of humor by the public and Friends is of that kind ofsitcoms; Second, Friends is a classic and influential sitcom and the characters are familiarto the public, therefore, the analyses of the scripts or the words in Friends will easily leadto the resonation of the readers.This research tries to study humor on the basis of Frame-Shifting Theory and takesFriends as a case. As a whole, this research not only has theoretical value, but also haspractical value. On one hand, analyzing the humorous cases in Friends will help peoplefurther comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of Frame-Shifting Theory and make it amore powerful explanatory theory; on the other hand, this study can provide technicalsupports for the creating of comedy, joke, sitcom and so on; finally, the study also intendsto create a useful way for people who want to be humorous.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Nonlinguistic Studies of Humor
Superiority Theory dates from western classical rhetoric theory of ancient Greek andRoman, mainly including those humor theories which are based on resentment, hostility,ridicule, attack, disparagement and superiority. Plato puts it that humor is themaliciousness that people express to those impotent (as cited in Cai & Yin, 2005). Aristotlealso mentions in the fifth chapter of Poetics that comedy is an imitation of characters of alower type (Aristotle, 1996, p.58). Later, Hobbes further develops this viewpoint. Hepoints out the function of superiority in humor. He holds that people always exist amongdifferent kinds of competition, and continuously keep looking for others’ disadvantages.Moreover, he believes that laughing is the performance that people conduct when theysuddenly notice that they are superior to other people (as cited in Cai & Yin, 2005).
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2.2 Linguistic Studies of Humor
That is to say, a joke always has two opposite scripts and these two scripts are fully orpartly coincide. The shortcomings of this theory are that it is unable to distinguish howfunny the joke is and it is lack of tests and verifications with practical examples. Moreover,it is unable to interpret humor with longer text. The study of this research makes up thesedefects and takes Friends as the object of empirical study. Sperber and Wilson (1996, p. 123) think that relevance is a matter of degree, and thedegree of the relevance depends on the achieved contextual effect and the processing effortit pays when dealing with the utterance. Their definition of relevance is as follows: “otherthings being equal, the stronger the contextual effect, the higher the relevance; other thingsbeing equal, the greater the processing effort, the lower the relevance” (Sperber & Wilson,1996, p. 124). Chen Chunhua (1999) considers that Relevance Theory provides modes ofunderstanding for the deduction of verbal humor, and it is the key to the producing andunderstanding of the effects of humor. Wang Yong (2001) chooses one of the theories ofhumor mechanism, i.e. incongruity theory to combine with pragmatic analysis. Heconsiders that pragmatic theories, especially the relevance theory, can interpret morereasonably why the creators of humor always express intentions indirectly—because theseadditional efforts can achieve better contextual effect, and it not only can convey theintention, but also can gain pleasure. There are also many researchers apply RelevanceTheory to the translation of humorous utterances, such as Xu Qingli and WangFuxiang(2002), Li Yi(2008), and Liu Xia(2008). They evaluate the translation of humorfrom the perspective of Relevance Theory, then put forward the elements and translationstrategies which we should take into consideration when translating. The deficiency ofRelevance Theory is that it is unable to explain the overall process of the production ofhumorous effect.
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Chapter Three Frame and Frame-Shifting Theory ....... 9
3.1 Frame and Its Development........ 9
3.2 Frame-Shifting Theory........ 10
Chapter Four Frame-Shifting Theory Based Analysis of Humor in Friends...... 16
4.1 A Brief Introduction of Friends...... 16
4.2 Frame-Shifting Theory Based Analysis of Humor in Friends...... 17
4.2.1 Typical Situations in Humor Interpretation...... 18
4.2.2 Default Values in Humor Interpretation..... 24
4.2.3 Reinterpretation in Humor Understanding ....... 28
4.2.4 Goal Presupposition in Humor Interpretation ........ 32
4.2.5 Nonconventional Meanings in Humor Interpretation........ 35
4.3 Summary...... 38
Chapter Five Empirical Study........ 41
5.1 Research Question......... 41
5.2 Research Hypothesis ..... 42
5.3 Participants......... 42
5.4 Research Design & Data Collection..... 42
5.5 Results.... 42
5.6 Discussion.... 44
Chapter Five Empirical Study
5.1 Research Question
As is shown at the end of chapter four, it seems that background knowledge isindispensable in interpreting humor, so this chapter designs an experiment to testify theimportance of background knowledge in comprehending humor. Moreover, sinceFrame-Shifting Theory is a suitable theory to explain humor as well as a kind of techniquewhich people can make use of to create humorous effect, it will be better for the humormakers to know the rank of the five cognitive perspectives about their ability to createhumorous effect for the purpose of better creating humorous cases.Therefore, this experiment attempts to investigate the following two questions:
(1) Whether background knowledge can help us understand humor or not?Background knowledge plays an extremely important role in Frame Theory. Theunderstanding of the scene in Friends relies on not only the meaning of the separateutterance, but also the background knowledge of the utterance. Background knowledge“affects utterance meaning” precisely because it can help to evoke some information frommemory to support action and interaction in the physical and social world (Coulson, 2010,p. 17). This experiment attempts to test whether background knowledge can help usunderstand the humor better or not.
(2) Which cognitive perspective of the Frame-Shifting Theory can best arouse theeffect of humor and in what order when it is employed as a means of the construction ofhumor?
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Conclusion
In this thesis, we choose the third season of Friends as the corpus for the humoranalysis and apply the five cognitive perspectives of Frame-Shifting Theory to givedetailed interpretation of the verbal humor in Friends. The present chapter attempts topresent the discoveries of the application of Frame-Shifting Theory, the implications forhumor makers, as well as the future orientation on this topic. This research focuses on the cognitive analyses of humor from the perspective ofFrame-Shifting Theory, and it explains how the effects of humor are formed. Through thecomprehensive analyses of the verbal humor in Friends, it comes out that Frame-ShiftingTheory is extremely suitable for the interpretation and construction of humor. The humormakers, such as the scriptwriter of a sitcom or the writer of jokes, or even any single manwho wants to own the glamour of humor can make use of the Frame-Shifting Theory toachieve their goal to make people happy. This thesis also may provide them with somereferences for better creating humorous effect.
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