A Cross-cultural Study of Humor Intensity in Chinese and English Family Jokes: A Large Language Model-Based Approach

Abstract

Humor is frequently conveyed through jokes, with family jokes serving as a particularly insightful medium that reflects both humor-creation techniques and culturally embedded perspectives on familial relationships. This study develops a computational model based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify humor intensity in Chinese and English family jokes, focusing on three key indicators: ambiguity, sentiment, and incongruity. Our analysis reveals a 3:1:1 weighting among these factors, underscoring ambiguity as the most influential determinant of humor intensity. The sentiment score of Chinese family jokes showcases a more pronounced polarity. Chinese and English family jokes share similar incongruity structures, but the Chinese family jokes tend to combine both semantic contrasts and plot reversals. English family jokes often have higher ambiguity scores than Chinese family jokes, which typically demonstrate this effect depending on multiple factors such as plot and cultural background. This study elucidates cross-cultural variations in humor design preferences and cultural conceptions of family through a comparative analysis.