Interpersonal Meaning Construction and Discourse Strategy Realization in Chinese Stand-Up Comedy

Abstract

As a live verbal performance genre, stand-up comedy forges social ties and articulates cultural observations through humorous, back-and-forth exchange with audiences. Existing scholarship has largely focused on humor’ cognitive underpinnings and cultural dimensions, but the linguistic mechanisms through which interpersonal meanings take shape in Chinese stand-up comedy remain largely unexamined from a systematic functional perspective. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study analyzes four final routines from The King of Stand-Up Comedy (Season 1) via mixed-methods analysis, probing Mood, Modality and Appraisal across lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic layers. Findings show that declaratives dominate narrative development, while interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives enhance interactional engagement. Modal choices and appraisal resources strategically balance stance and solidarity. These resources are organized into five discourse strategies which reduce social distance, enhance humor, and facilitate social critique.