Humorous Language in English Sitcoms from the Perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Case Study of Friends

This paper aims to explore the linguistic mechanisms and contextual triggers of humorous language in English sitcoms from the perspective of Systemic Func-tional Linguistics (SFL), with the classic American sitcom Friends as the core corpus. It focuses on Halliday’s three metafunctions and register theory to ana-lyze how humorous effects form through the interaction between lexi-cal-grammatical choices and situational contexts. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study selects typical humorous dialogues from Friends. These dia-logues cover diverse scenarios such as daily chats, interpersonal conflicts, and special occasions, and span all ten seasons of the sitcom to ensure representa-tiveness. From the SFL lens, humor is realized through specific linguistic pat-terns: transitivity deviations in the ideational function, mood metaphors and modality mismatches in the interpersonal function, and thematic structure var-iations plus unexpected new information placement in the textual function. From the register theory perspective, field deviations, tenor mismatches, and mode features jointly act as contextual triggers for humor. The research con-cludes that Friends’ humor results from the synergy of Systemic Functional Linguistics-based lexical-grammatical choices and register-situational interac-tions. It enriches the application of SFL in sitcom humor studies and provides practical insights, helping English learners improve their appreciation of sitcom humor by grasping the linguistic rules of English humorous language, and offer-ing references for sitcom creators to design contextually fitting humorous con-tent.