The Pragmatics of Humor in the English Sitcom Friends and its Arabic Subtitles: A Pragmatic Analysis of Humor Types and Transfer

Abstract

Interlingual subtitling is a popular mode of audiovisual translation in the Arab world and a manifestation of linguistic and intercultural communication that yields a wide range of audiovisual products exchanged overseas, among which, sitcoms. Presumably, sitcoms are intended to be primarily humorous and entertaining for both the source audience and the target viewers, and usually it is the punch line, that is the last few words of a joke, that makes it funny to the audience. In case of television and radio comedy, a canned laughter under the form of a recorded laughter is systematically used after punch lines to accentuate the humor intention and trigger the laughter effect. However, subtitling humor from English into Arabic is polysemiotic and proves to be challenging due to some linguistic and pragmatic differences between both languages. This research investigates humor in one of the most outstanding American sitcoms, that is Friends. The aim of this research is to examine the pragmatics of humor by identifying the different humor types in English-Arabic subtitling of sitcoms and their corresponding pragmatic transfer type using an inductive qualitative research method. Based on the theoretical framework of Raphaelson-West (1989) that advocates three types of humor; namely cultural, universal and linguistic; the analysis has been conducted over 33 episodes of Friends to analyze the translation of punch lines in Arabic. Results have showcased that Raphaelson-West (1989) threefold taxonomy has unfolded 9 other subtypes of humor that correlated with either negative or positive pragmatic transfer, and revealed that universal and linguistic humor were successfully transferred to the target language except for the phonological humor type. Cultural humor involving idioms and cultural concepts, however, proved to challenging, literally translated and devoid of humor. Particularly, the transfer of taboo-based humor and inferred humor are conditioned by understanding and recognizing the pragmatics of punch lines. The findings would contribute to existing literature and research on interlingual subtitling and humor studies.