Keywords
Hong Kong
humour
morphorsyntactic analysis
stand-up comedy
How to Cite
Abstract
Prior research has recognised that code-switching (CS) is a linguistic phenomenon that is inherently humorous or potentially conducive to eliciting humour in social contexts. Comedians in stand-up comedy shows often switch codes to enhance the humorous effect of their speeches, cultivating a comedic atmosphere. However, the linguistic features that facilitate the humour of CS are yet to be explored. In Hong Kong, it is common to see stand-up comedians switch codes between Cantonese and English or other languages, such as Japanese and Korean. Drawing upon the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton, 1993), this case study focuses on a stand-up comedy show by Jim Chim Sui-man, a popular local stage actor and comedian, examining the morphosyntactic patterns and rhetorical features of humorous CS to elucidate the relationship between humour and the structure of CS. The results show that CS does not guarantee a humorous effect and that classic CS is more frequently used by the comedian than composite CS. Specifically, intra-sentential switches are the only type of CS that evoke humour due to their well-formedness, productivity, and effectiveness. The switches involve more content morphemes than system morphemes, as content morphemes provide the comedian with greater flexibility to switch codes and convey meanings. In addition, puns and transliterations are commonly embedded in humorous CS, as their homophonic nature enables comedians to exploit word meanings to create ambiguous meanings that enhance the humorous effect.
References
Amuzu, E. (2013). Producing composite codeswitching: The role of the modularity of language production. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(4) 384–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006913481139
Appel, R., & Muysken, P. (1987). Language contact and bilingualism. Edward Arnold.
Apte, M. L. (1985). Humour and laughter: An anthropological approach. Cornell University Press.
Attardo, S. (2020). The linguistics of humour: An introduction. Oxford University Press.
Attardo, S. (2001). Humour and irony in interaction: From mode adoption to failure of detection. In L. Anolli, R. Ciceri & G. Riva (Eds.), Say not to say: New perspectives on miscommunication (pp. 165-185). IOS Press.
Badara, A. (2018). Stand-up comedy humour discourse in local perspective in Indonesia. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 7(7), 222. https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.7p.222
Bolton, K. (2003). Chinese Englishes: A sociolinguistic history. Cambridge University Press.
Chen, Y. (2013). On lexical borrowing from English into Chinese via transliteration. English Language and Literature Studies, 3(4), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v3n4p1
Davis, M. S. (1993). What’s so funny? The comic conception of culture and society. University of Chicago Press.
Djafarova, E. (2008). Why do advertisers use puns? A linguistic perspective. Journal of Advertising Research, 48(2), 267-275.
Fairchild, S., & Hell, J. G. v. (2015). Determiner-noun code-switching in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 150-161. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728915000619
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325-340.
Furukawa, T. A. (2022). “No flips in the pool”. Pragmatics, 17(3), 371-385. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17.3.02fur
Gardner-Chloros, P. (2009). Code-switching. Cambridge University Press.
Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. Routledge.
Gibbons, J. (1983). Attitudes towards languages and code-mixing in Hong Kong. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4(2/3), 129-147.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Hadei, M., & Ramakrishna, R. (2016). English single content morphemes in Persian structure: Applying the Matrix Language Frame Model (MLF) and 4M Model. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(4), 433-453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006916631437
Hong Kong Festival Orchestra. (2024). Jim Chim. https://www.hkfo.org/en/article/Jim-Chim/12/230/
Jalil, S. A. (2009). Grammatical perspectives on code-switching. ReVEL, 7(13). Retrieved June 17, 2017, from http://www.revel.inf.br/eng/
Joos, M. (1967). The five clocks. Harcourt, Brace & World. (Original work published 1961)
Kebeya, H. (2013). Inter- and intra-sentential switching: Are they really comparable? International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 3(5), 225-233.
Li, D. C. S. (2000). Cantonese-English code-switching research in Hong Kong: A Y2K review. World Englishes, 19(3), 305-322.
Macaulay, R. K. S. (1987). The social significance of Scottish dialect humour. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 65, 53-63.
McClure, E., & McClure, M. (1988). Macro- and micro-sociolinguistic dimensions of code-switching in Vingard (Romania). In M. Heller (Ed.), Codeswitching: Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 25-51). De Gruyter Mouton.
Miller, T., Hempelmann, C. F., & Gurevych, I. (2017). Semeval-2017 task 7: Detection and interpretation of English puns. Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/s17-2005
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J. L. (2000). Testing a model of morpheme classification with language contact data. International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(1), 1-8.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in code-switching. Clarendon Press.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford University Press.
Mintz, L. E. (1985). Stand-up comedy as social and cultural mediation. American Quarterly, 37(1), 71–80.
Ofer, D., & Shahaf, D. (2022). Cards against AI: Predicting humour in a fill-in-the-blank party game. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.394
Palani, H., & Bakar, F. A. (2023). A case study on the use of humorous code-switching in Harith Iskander’ stand-up comedy shows. LSP International Journal, 10(2), 13-26. https://doi.org/10.11113/lspi.v10.20121
Poplack, S. (2000). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7-8), 581-618.
Ross, A. (2005). The language of humour. Taylor and Francis e-Library.
Salem, E., Jarrah, M., & Alrashdan, I. (2020). Humour and the creative use of English expressions in the speech of university students: A case from Jordan. Sage Open, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020914552
Sartre, J. P. (1981). The comic actor. In R. W. Corrigan (Ed.), Comedy: Meaning and form (pp. 185–189). Harper & Row.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2000). Intercultural communication. Blackwell Publishers.
Siegel, J. (1995). How to get a laugh in Fijian: Code-switching and humour. Language in Society, 24, 95-110.
Stølen, M. (1992). Codeswitching for humour and ethnic identity: Written Danish-American occasional songs. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 13, 215-28.
Sridhar, S. N., & Sridhar, K. K. (1980). The syntax and psycholinguistics of bilingual code-mixing. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 10(1), 203-215.
Tsang, W. K., & Wong, M. (2004). Constructing a shared ‘Hong Kong identity’ in comic discourses. Discourse & Society, 15(6), 767-785. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926504046504
Wang, A. (2024). A comparative analysis of stand-up comedy in contemporary China and a collection of classic Chinese jokes. Lingual: Journal of Language and Culture, 17(1), 34. https://doi.org/10.24843/ljlc.2024.v17.i01.p05
Williams, B. (1987). Humour, linguistic ambiguity, and disputing in a Guyanese community. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 65, 79-94.
Woolard, K. A. (1987). Codeswitching and comedy in Catalonia. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, 1(1), 106-122. https://doi.org/10.1075/iprapip.1.1.04woo. Reprinted in M. Heller (Ed.), (1988), Codeswitching: Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 53-76). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Wellisch, H. H. (1975). Transcription and transliteration: An annotated bibliography on conversion of scripts. Institute of Modern Languages.
Valdes-Fallis, G. (1977). Code-switching among bilingual Mexican-American women: Towards an understanding of sex-related language alternation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 7, 65-72.
Yip, J. W. C., & Tang, S. W. (2022). Lexical variations in Asian Chinese speaking communities: A corpus-informed study of online, offline, and digital. Global Chinese, 8(2), 161-187.
Yip, J. W. C., & Wakefield, J. C. (2024). English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese: False friend cognates and English vocabulary acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review, 15(6), 2901-2924.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 The European Journal of Humour Research