本地电视谈话节目的幽默 : 以《艺点心思》为案例 = ANALYSIS OF HUMOUR IN LOCAL TELEVISION TALK SHOW : USING 'CELEBRITEA BREAK' AS CASE STUDY

Abstract

This thesis analyses the verbal humor present in the conversations of local celebrity talk show "Celebritea Break” Seasons 1 and 2. In this thesis, the concept of verbal humor is distinguished into two domains "Jokes” and “Conversational Humor", which differ most importantly in two aspects: 1) Jokes are context-free and Conversational Humor is context-bound; and 2) Conversational Humor often serves as an integral and functional part of a conversation while Jokes do not. This differentiation plays an important role in the analysis of verbal humor in the rest of the thesis. It has been observed that studies on verbal humor typically focus on analysing "Jokes", such as narrative jokes, instead of "Conversational Humor". In the few cases whereby humorous corpus was retrieved from verbal sources, they remain largely from media sources like comedy movies, situational comedy, stand-up comedy etc, which are humor-driven speeches or conversations that are usually crafted beforehand. Little focus was given to impromptu humor that occurs in unrehearsed conversations. Hence, in this thesis, we aim to analyse verbal humor, specifically "Conversational Humor" in the context of unrehearsed conversations in celebrity talk show. Using a pragmatics point of view, we will investigate how context plays an important role in the production of humorous effect in Conversational Humor, as well as the discourse functions they possess in the context of television talk shows. Pragmatic-based theories like Cooperative and Politeness Principle, and Politeness Theory will be incorporated as a basis for our analysis.