Abstract

My Own Swordsman and Friends are two most popular situation comedies respectively in China and America, both of which feature with abundant humorous language, high culture-loaded plots and exaggerated performance, from which the two countries’ different notions of love, friendship and money can be observed and therefore treated  as  mirrors reflecting eastern and western societies in this paper. It has been concluded that some notions of the three aspects are sharply contrastive or overlapped to certain degree. With these differences and similarities recognized, it is hopefully beneficial for better cross-cultural communications.

Key words: Friends; My Own Swordsman; cultural differences and similarities, individualism, collectivism, cross-cultural communications

摘 要

《武林外传》和《老友记》分别是中国和美国最受欢迎的优秀情景喜剧。两者在剧情上都使用了幽默的语言，高文化负载手法和夸张的表演方式,并反映出中美对友情，爱情和金钱态度的异同。两者作为映照社会的镜子，分别反映了中西文化的自身特点，在这三方面他们有明显的对比成分和一定程度上的重叠。对于差异和相似成分的充分认知，有助于对跨文化交流的促进和加深。

关键词： 老友记，武林外传，文化的差异和相似，个人主义，集体主义，跨文化交际

1. Introduction
Situation comedy is a unique form of TV art which was invented in the United States, most of which is based on real life and aiming at telling the daily stories of ordinary people. In order to achieve a certain artistic effect, a lot of exaggerated comic performance methods are frequently employed in the situation comedy. In fact, situation comedy is a very powerful demonstration of all aspects of a society, which, as a kind of television programs, enjoys inherent advantages compared with the social text because of its intuition and live nature. Situation comedy is one kind of art based on life, but from other side, it is the concentration of life’s all aspects including pleasure, anger, sorrow and joy. Through the comparison of different situation comedies in China and America, it is easy to understand the differences and similarities between the two different cultures.