A Comparative Study of Verbal Humor in Translations of Classic Chinese and American Sitcom Clips

Abstract

As an indispensable cultural form of modern entertainment life, comedy has become a window to understand countries. In order to better appreciate the excellent cultural works of various countries, this article compares the two classic sitcoms in China and the United States from the perspective of high and low contexts, hoping to analyze their words through comparison. Humor, to explore the reasons for the differences in verbal humor in high and low contexts, and then predict the trend of verbal humor expression under the influence of high and low contexts in China and the United States. The research clips in this article come from the American sitcom Friends and the Chinese sitcom Home with Kids. This paper is mainly divided into five parts. The first part is the literature review, which mainly summarizes the research on verbal humor at home and abroad; the second part is the methodology, that is, the main theories used to study the text, including high-context and low-context theories. The third part is mainly to discover and compare the phenomena and differences of verbal humor between the two Chinese and American sitcom works. The fourth part focuses on exploring the reasons for these differences under high and low contexts. The fifth part is the conclusion of the paper.