Contextual dimensions in interactional humour: How humour is practiced in selected American and Chinese situation comedies

Abstract

Situation comedies are a form of performing arts deliberately created to arouse laughter in the audience. As such, they serve as a rich corpus for the linguistic analysis of interpersonal and interactional humour. The effectiveness of interactional humour is strongly dependent on the context in which intended meanings are exchanged and understood. In this paper, I develop a framework of contextual dimensions (physical, temporal and experiential) which is used to describe how humour is communicated in social interactions. An analysis is conducted to study the mechanisms of humour embedded in interpersonal interactions in the American situation comedy “Friends” and the Chinese situation comedy “I Love My Family”. The results of the analysis show that the frequency of humour is just under 50% in both sitcoms, bearing a remarkable consistency. Overall, “Friends” is found to be more palatable to an international audience compared to “I Love My Family”. The greater utilization of the temporal contextual dimension and the lesser utilization of the experiential contextual dimension for “Friends” compared to “I Love My Family” means that the former depends more on linguistic and logical elements and less on social and cultural knowledge in order to achieve the humourous effects.