Introduction
Research Background
With the accelerating development of science and technology, television, as a kind of more direct cultural medium and carrier, is gradually replacing the status of traditional print media and it also plays a more and more important role in the intercultural communication. Talk Show, a kind of TV program, which becomes more and more popular in China these years, is originated in the 18th century in England. But it gets fast development in the USA instead. The talk show usually focuses on some social problems which are concerned by the public. Meanwhile this kind of program has set more or less influence on the society and the public. In the USA the number of various TV talk shows takes about 40 percent of the total number of the TV programs shown on the TV screen, which can be regarded as a carrier of the great changes both in culture and in society, for the content of the shows is closely related to political, economic, cultural and social development. So talk show has always been a hot topic for studies. American talk show has already become a very important part of Chinese audience‘s daily life since it was introduced to China. For its witty humor, interesting content but reflecting every aspect of American life with humanistic humor, TV talk show provides for the audience a way to understand and experience the American social and cultural life as well as a good way for English learning. Both domestic and foreign researchers have studied it from various aspects, for example the strategies of the how the talk show form its way to spread to the Americans, how the talk show its influence on the Americans‘ live and so on, among which the humorous utterances of the talk show is undoubtedly one of the most popular aspects that the researchers focus on in their academic studies.
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Research Question
The researcher attempts to analyze the verbal humor in the famous TV talk show,The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallonvia applying Sperber and Wilson‘s relevance theory. This thesis tries to answer the following questions: 1. How is the relevance theory applied to produce humorous effect in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon? 2. Why the relevance theory has an explanatory power in explaining the English verbal humor? 3. What factors lead to failure in interpreting English verbal humor? This thesis focuses on the three research questions put forward above and discusses the verbal humor which is selected from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon based on the framework of the relevance theory.
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Chapter One Literature Review
Humor is an indispensable part &nbs
