A research on Joe Huang's humor in his stand up comedy

Abstract

Stand-up comedy (also know by many as talk show) as a carrier of laughter and the unique American humor culture, favored increasingly by Chinese audiences. This paper focuses on the Joe Wong’s stand-up comedy performances, starting from the definition of humor, analysing Joe Wong’s distinctive style in his stand-up comedy, and explores related Pragmatic Principles and mechanism of humor in Joe Wong’s stand-up comedy performances .

According to Relevance Theory and the Cooperation Principle, this paper focus on the verbal humor of the Chinese-American stand-up comedy performer Joe Wong’s stand-up comedy performances . With Grice principles of cooperation, from the point of view of use and violation of the Cooperation Principle, select the US-Joe Wong stand-up comedy as humor corpus analysis of verbal humor to explore Wong as a first-generation Chinese immigrants in the United States how to obtain the success of the funny entertainment, recognized by the United States audience. The paper is also designed to help Chinese English learners to appreciate the meaning of humor from a deeper level of language, a better understanding from the exotic cultural humor, thus contributing to the mutual understanding of Chinese and Western cultures.

This exploration not only can make people have a better understanding of the stand-up comedy humor of United States, but also is conducive to a further study of the phenomenon of humor language in a variety of Conversational Communication, providing us a better understanding and mastery of the language, improving the ability to  the appreciation and application of language.

Key words: ; Stand-up comedy; humor; Cooperation Principle; Relevance Theory; Talk show;