摘 要

情景剧是一种来自美国的短剧，由大量的幽默情景组成。它们是幽默最好的载体。近年来，随着中美之间的交流日益频繁，一些美国的情景剧, 如《老友记》也引入了中国。另一部中国喜剧《爱情公寓》和《老友记》在情景设置和人物上很相似，但受文化影响，它们的幽默表达风格却不同。

本研究旨在从文化视角下以《爱情公寓》和《老友记》为例对比中美幽默风格的差异。

本研究主要关注两个问题：

1.中美情景幽默有哪些差异？

2.中美言语幽默有哪些差异？

首先，在情景幽默中本文选择跨文化交流中最常见话题：性、种族歧视、缺点错误和想法幼稚。通过《爱情公寓》和《老友记》对话题选择的次数来分析中美情景幽默风格的差异。结果表明，美国的《老友记》选择更多的是性和种族歧视话题，而中国的《爱情公寓》更喜欢用缺点错误和想法幼稚来表达幽默。其次，在言语幽默中文章通过比较《爱情公寓》和《老友记》对修辞手法的在剧中出现的次数进行比较。这些修辞手法是表达幽默常见的修辞，它们分别是：委婉语、双关、仿拟以及其他。对比结果表明，两部剧对委婉语的使用的次数差别不大，但是，就双关和仿拟而言，《老友记》更倾向于双关，而《爱情公寓》更多的使用仿拟。

通过研究我们发现中美幽默表达存在差异，文化是导致差异重要角色。首先，在情景幽默中，中美对话题的选择不同，而且在言语幽默中，这两部剧对修辞手法的选择也不同。

关键词：幽默 《老友记》 《爱情公寓》 文化

1. Introduction

1.1 Research background

Humor is an ancient and interdisciplinary research subject, which could be traced to Plato and Aristotle era during the ancient Greece, and kept sustainable development in the next two thousand years. Humorous phenomenon has aroused many scholars’ interests in different areas’ subjects in the world. Lots of achievements have been obtained both in theory and methodology. The cross disciplinary and cross cultural nature of humor determines that humor research is universal. Therefore, numerous proposed theories of humor will be not at all surprising in the long history of humor research. At the same time, since having the same foundation of research-humor and many similarities between results of the research in different fields, it is advisable we can learn from each other.

Different countries have different kinds of humor. Compared with American humor, Chinese humor has longer history. According to historical records, Chinese humor could be traced back to the Qin Dynasty. The king called Fei You was the earliest “humorist”. “Fei” was also called Haiku. It took on the form of acrobatics; “You” was called farce, which represented the ancient best actor’s name. Humor had experienced several stages of development in history. In modern times, Lin Yutang (1924) first published in Morning New. In his paper, he was the first who translated the word “humor” into “幽默”. Humor is not related to the ancient Chinese words “humor” (silent). Just as a new word “humor” spread, humor as the original meaning of ancient Chinese words was gradually replaced by the new connotation of aesthetic concept. Lin Yutang and Lu Xun created many widely known works in the development of humor, such as Ah Q, Kong Yiji, and the like. They put forward some creative opinions on humor from theory to practice and provide a paradigm for the healthy development of Chinese humor. American humor begins in nineteenth Century with a relatively short history. In the history of American humor, the black people play an important role. At first, a special kind of humor is called “black humor”. It is said that everyone has a habit of humor and talent. Compared with Europeans, they can accept the fate of the turning point. Mark Twain is a famous writer in the history of American humor. His language is not only full of humor but also full of wisdom. Humor plays a very important role not only in the ancient times but also at present around the world.

Situation comedy, often shortened to sitcom, consists of a large quantity of humorous utterances. It represents significantly one of the most styles of humorous expression. In fact, sitcom has a long history in China and America. As the original place of sitcom, America has achieved rather remarkable success after nearly fifty years of development. In 1947, a new television pattern which latter was called sitcom emerged in America. Then with the increasing development and improvement of sitcom, sitcom in America became more and more mature and gradually developed into black humor. In 1994, an important situation comedy Friends was put on NBC. In 1992, Ying Da, a scholar in China, brought the sitcom art from the United States to China. Since then in order to satisfy the constant demands of people, sitcom in China got greatly improved. And later, sitcom became more and more popular in China and many sitcoms sprung up instantly. One of the most popular and representative sitcoms is Love Apartment. Friends and Love Apartment are all greatly popular among audiences and get a big praise. Love Apartment is a popular and successful sitcom. It is a good case to show how humor comes out in the communication of Chinese people. Love Apartment successfully realized the effect of humor. There are a lot of unexpected and funny humorous performances. All these humorous performances provide the latest data for my paper. Friends, a famous sitcom, is selected for its much conversational humors. Friends has been one of top television series since its debut on NBC. It has been nominated for American Comedy Reward for many times and actually won the reward in 2000. It is a typical American sitcom. The two sitcoms are actually similar in the whole situation.

Nowadays, sitcom is more and more popular. At the same time, humor is the core attractiveness in sitcom. However, China and America own different humorous styles. And those differences are caused greatly by the different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, under the modern age of globalization, to have a well recognition on each other’s differences of humorous styles is rather significant.

1.2 Need for the study

The research is generally concerned about the differences between Chinese and American humorous styles from the perspective of culture. And the thesis makes a case of Friends and Love Apartment.

Recently, sitcom has tremendously attracted audiences’ eyes in the world. Friends, at that time, was so sought-after in America and China even in the world. The show focused on the lives of a group of six friends: rich, spoiled “daddy’s girl”; Rachel Green, learning to make it on her own; neurotically clean chef Monica Geller; wise-cracking office drone Chandler Bing; simple minded actor Joey Tribbiani; nerdy paleontologist Ross Geller, who goes through three failed marriages; and quirky, optimistic masseuse and folk singer – song writer Phoebe Buffay. They taste all kinds of flavors of life together. Love Apartment, a very popular sitcom in recent years, is considered as the Chinese version of Friends, a typical American sitcom. However, though Love Apartment is greatly influenced by Friends, there must be differences in humor expressions due to the differences in language and culture. Love apartment become so popular because firstly the humorous and love stories make the audience happy and relaxed; secondly because the stories are close to people’s life and can help people to reflect their life better. In the apartment there are seven people: Lu Zhanbo, who returns after graduating from abroad, is an intelligent boy but not good at dealing social activities relationship with girls. Lin Wanyu, whose father is a millionaire banker, was born in a rich family. Zeng Xiaoxian is an announcer in the late-night talk show Your Moon, My Heart. Hu Yifei, Lu Zhanbo’s stepsister, is a lecturer in a university and the other characters in the sitcoms are Chen Meija, Lv Ziqiao, Tang Youyou, Guangu and Zhang Wei. Everyone in the sitcom gives people much happiness with their humor. The two sitcoms play a very important part in delivering humor but the way of delivering humor in the two sitcoms are greatly different.

Under the era of globalization, to have a better understanding of the differences of humor is so significant. Some scholars have made researches into the two sitcoms. Some mainly study Friends, and some made a research from the perspective of linguistics. This thesis will research the differences between Chinese and American humorous styles from the perspective of culture.

2. Literature review

2.1 Studies on humor

2.1.1 Definition of humor

Humor exists everywhere around the world. Then what exactly is humor. In fact, it hasn’t been made an agreement of the definition of humor. People in different research fields may define humor differently. We will discuss the definition of humor in different perspectives.

The Etymon of Humor, which can be traced to Ancient Greece, where Hippocrates (about 460 —377 BC), the famous doctor and the founder of Western Medicine, first used the word “humor” to refer to the body fluids. The cognitive study on humor is to find out what makes something funny. The psychological study on humor is to find out when and why we feel happy. The sociological study on humor focuses on how humor is used in social interactions. Indicated by the Encyclopedia Britannica, humor is employed as a general term to denote anything comic, or anything that makes us laugh (Yang 2009). From the above, we can get a rough idea of the definition of humor. Though it is very hard to get a fixed definition of humor, we can find a common character that humor is what can make people laugh and happy. “Humor is primarily defined as the laughter to express one’s pleasure in western definitions while Chinese scholars put more emphasis on the social functions of humor.” (Qian 6) All in all, humor is a form of making laughter and happiness.

2.1.2 Classifications of humor

As humor comes from social life, there is no strict boundary between one type and the other. People study humor in accordance with their own interest and orientations, so there are many kinds of classification standards of humor. Hence it’s difficult to give an identical classification of humor.

Gong Weicai (1991) insists that humor can be divided into five parts: gray humor, black humor, yellow humor, sick humor and rosy humor. Xu Linxin (2003) says that humor is classified as high humor and low humor. High humor refers to be graceful and tasted humor, while low humor can be characterized jokes and happens in our daily life. According to Qian (2014) humor can be classified into situational humor and verbal humor. Situational humor must depend on the situation and is placed in a certain context, whose humorous effect relies on the context to a large degree. Pantomime, farce and cartoon all belong to situational humor. In situational humor, people use imitation, disguise and impersonation to create amusement in which language plays a small part. Verbal humor is made by the use of sounds, words or sentences to create funniness including satires, jokes, cross-talks, short sketches, comic verses, etc. They depend much on the language to create ambiguity or pun, etc. to achieve humorous effects, and number of verbal humor is much larger in contrast to situational humor. In other words, verbal humor makes up the larger part of humor. Qian’s opinion is the research focus in the thesis.

In fact there are more classifications in terms of different standards, but situational and verbal humor will be focused in the thesis. To have a better understanding of situational humor and verbal humor, firstly this thesis will introduce high context and low context.