Abstract: This thesis focuses on the structural analysis of humors, aiming to apply Roman Jakobson’s theory about speech events to the humorous in Friends to acknowledge the essence of humors from a constituent perspective. Besides, this is only a tentative research paper and another aim is to incur more insight and consciousness when the student faces the challenges of study of English alone after graduation. The author finds it incomplete to explain the original theory in humor in previous researches. The author finds that the structures of humors in the previous researches are not fully elaborated. Therefore, she further analyzes and explores the reasons why the humorous speech events make people laugh in Friends from structure perspective.
Key words: Roman Jakobson, Structuralism linguistics, Humor
Contents
Chapter1 Introduction 2
1.1 Background 2
1.2 Previous studies and approach of the present thesis 2
1.3 Organization of the thesis 3
Chapter2 Literature Review 3
2.1 A Brief Literature Review of Studies on Humor 3
2.2 Methodology 5
2.2.1 Structuralism Linguistics 5
2.2.2 The descriptions of theory of the structuralists, Roman Jakobson 5
Chapter3 Situation Comedy and Humor 7
3.1 The definition of humor 7
3.2 The social functions of humor 8
3.3 The definition of situation comedy 9
3.4 A brief overview of “Friends” 10
Chapter 4 Approaches to Humor in Friends 11
4.1 Jakobson’ Theory applies on humor in Friends 11
Chapter 5 Conclusion 21
References 22
Acknowledgements 23
