Interpretation of verbal humor in the sitcom the big bang theory from the perspective of adaptation-relevance theory

Abstract

Humor plays a very important role in every sphere of our daily life, especially verbal humor which is mainly carried by language use in a certain context to achieve humorous effect. As a special carrier of humor, sitcom, which is a type of comedy performance, has attracted millions of audiences with humorous utterances all over the world. The American sitcom The Big Bang Theory has been one of the most popular American sitcoms in China within these years which largely count on verbal humor to create general humorous effect. Based on the achievements made by previous researchers, the present study explores the verbal humor in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory in the light of a new model-Adaptation-Relevance model so as to reveal its interpretive power of humor and its feasibility in analyzing verbal humor in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The paper mainly adopts the qualitative and descriptive methods to analyze the selected examples and finally comes to a conclusion that this Adaptation-Relevance model which is an integration of two powerful pragmatic theories holds the interpretive power for verbal humor and has feasibility in analyzing verbal humor by using the data in sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Also through the research it further investigates Adaptation-Relevance Theory and extends the application scope and interpretive power of this model. © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.