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Humor in Friends

A Practical Analysis of the Humor Elements in American Sitcom Friend and Attempt to Explore Their Implications
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Introduction
Friends is an American sitcom (situation comedy) created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004.  The series describes the daily life of a group of American young 代写留学生论文people, including their friendship, love stories, working difficulties and etc.  The comedy is unbelievably popular that it has won so many awards and was nominated for 63 Primetime Emmy Awards.
In the past several years, “Friends” accompanied me as real friends every day. I was astonished by its humor elements which could be found in almost every single part and feel interested about American humor. Before I decide the final topic of my essay, the simple question aroused in my mind is that why I as a Chinese can be fascinated by such an American culture-based sitcom, and why I can never express the humor to my parents in Chinese.
To answer my own questions, I think firstly it’s essential to understand what humor is, then what American humor is, and finally American humor in Friends. So basically this essay will follow this structure and thus consist of Definition of Humor, Concepts of American Humor, Friends, Pragmatic Analysis of Humor Elements in Friends, Conclusion and Reference.
Definition of Humor
It’s difficult to make an exact definition for humor, but according to Sultanoff, Steven M., a sense of humor can be defined as the ability to perceive one or more of the universal characteristics. Therefore, one’s sense of humor involves the capacity to appreciate incongruity, absurdity, an unexpected future, a pleasant surprise, a startle, getting it and/or emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. 
Since a sense of humor is defined as above, therefore a humor can be a funny situation caused by incongruity, absurdity, an unexpected future, a pleasant surprise, a startle, getting it and/or emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. In the following part, I would clarify each one of these factors that can cause humor.
Incongruity: When a stimulus is perceived as incongruous, it is likely to be experienced as humorous. Like the costumes of a clown are weird and thus always cause people laugh, which is due to the imbalance matching of clothes, make-up and body language.

Bibliography
[1]Attardo,Salvatore.The Violation of Grice's Maxims in Jokes[A].Hall,K.et al.,(Eds.) Proceedings of the 16th Berkeley Linguistics Society Conference,1990:355-362.
[2]Attardo,Salvatore&Raskin,Victor.Script theory revis(it)ed:joke similarity and joke representational model[J].Humor.International Journal of Humor Research 4-3,1991: 293-347.
[3]Attardo，Salvatore.Violation of Conversational Maxims and https://www.51lunwen.org/StudentPapers.htmlCooperation:the case of jokes[J]. Journal of Pragmatics,1993(19):537一558.
[4] Sultanoff, Steven M. "Integrating Humor into Psychotherapy." in Play Therapy with Adults. Ed. Charles