摘要

在文化多元化的今天，跨文化对比有重要的研究意义。幽默与文化有着极为密切的关系。作为语言的一部分，幽默被赋予了丰富的文化内涵，并且其词汇意义和象征意义都反映了不同的文化及文化背景。为了促进多元文化社会的发展和加强跨文化交流，了解和掌握幽默及其在文化交流中的作用具有极为重要的价值和意义。
    本文从探讨幽默的概念及其在中英两种语言中的历史比较出发，仔细研究了中外幽默的跨文化对比，包括相同点与相异点及中外幽默理论。本文旨在认真分析中外幽默对比并在此基础上增强人们的跨文化交际能力。

关键词：幽默，文化内涵，理论
                     
Abstract

In today’s multi-cultural society, it is very important and significant to do intercultural comparison. Humor is closely connected with culture. As a part of language, humor is endowed with abundant cultural connotations. Moreover, humor’ lexical meaning and symbolic meaning reflect various cultures and cultural backgrounds. In order to promote the development of the multi-cultural society and cross-cultural communication, it is very significant to understand and grasp humor and what roles it plays in intercultural communication.
Based on the discussions of the concepts of humors and historical comparison of Chinese and English language, this paper makes a detailed research on the intercultural comparison between Chinese and English humor. What’s more, this paper summarizes and demonstrates the main similarities and differences of Chinese and foreign humors and three basic conventional theories. This paper aims to do a detailed research on intercultural comparison between Chinese and foreign humor and enhance people’s understanding of cross-cultural communication.

Key words: humor, cultural connotation, theory 

1. Introduction
     Humor brings people laughter and joy in our daily life and it penetrates in almost all aspects of our life. It is as a common phenomenon that humor is much more complicated than people can imagine. Humor has become a topic for many researchers for its special status. Based on many theories, we can easily recognize what humor is and what social function it serves. The universal definition of humor is hard to define because humor has been researched from various perspectives . And even in the same research field, scholars could not agree with each other on the definition. In this chapter, the author firstly introduces the development of humor from abroad and at home in history, especially the definitions of humor in different periods; then the author presents the similarities of creation of Chinese and foreign humor, and finally the three classical humor understanding theories are presented as well as the common problems that exist from the linguistic study of humor.