Abstract:

In recent decades, some hot American sitcoms, such as The Big bang Theory, are popular with people. While in China, Ipartment also catches much attention. Sitcom, as a form of comedic performance, is born with humor. However, humor is always associated with a certain culture. Due to the different cultural background, the expression of humor in Chinese and American sitcoms is dramatically different. Even after translation, people who grew up in different culture can not understand the humor in other countries. Researchers have made more progress in different humor expression in the field of translation and pragmatics than in culture. Even if culture is involved, qualitative and quantitative method is rarely adopted. This paper is based on the two sitcoms which were mentioned above, by using qualitative and quantitative analysis, to survey on the different humor expressions in Chinese and American sitcoms. The paper emphasizes the importance of cultural influence and puts forward some strategies which can be useful in appreciating the humor in Chinese and American sitcoms from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, in the hope of advocating foreign language learning.

Keywords: humor; sitcoms; culture; differences

摘  要：

近十几年来，美国的一些热门情景喜剧，例如《生活大爆炸》深受英语学习者的喜爱。而在国内，情景喜剧《爱情公寓》也是备受青年观众的青睐。情景喜剧作为一种喜剧演出的形式，其中的幽默是必不可少的。然而，幽默往往是根植与本土文化的，由于中美文化的差异，即使是经过翻译，幽默也不易引起异域观众的共鸣。以往对于这种幽默差异的研究主要集中在翻译或语用学领域，基于文化差异方面的研究很少。即便有所涉及，也极少运用定量研究的方法深入明确的探讨。本文选取上述两部情景喜剧进行比较分析，通过对所选语料中幽默产生的文化根源进行定性定量研究，深入探讨中美文化差异下幽默的不同表现形式，详细分析其文化根源的差异性，从而突出历史、风俗等文化因素对幽默效果的影响。最后给出欣赏不同文化下的情景喜剧中幽默的策略，强调了文化差异在外语学习过程中的重要性。

关键词：幽默；情景喜剧；文化；差异