隐喻是我们生活中常见的语言现象，随着认知语言学的发展，语言学家们开始关注隐喻与意识的关系。其中莱考夫和约翰逊从认知的角度系统地研究隐喻，提出了著名的概念隐喻理论。概念隐喻理论挑战传统的隐喻观，认为隐喻不仅仅是简单的修辞格。他们认为隐喻无处不在，并且是我们概念系统的基础。本文旨在运用概念隐喻理论对美国情景喜剧《老友记》中的言语幽默进行分析，依据概念隐喻的三种类型，即结构隐喻、方向隐喻和本体隐喻来分析三种类型的概念隐喻对于言语幽默的产生起到的作用。研究表明，通过映射，概念隐喻可以赋予目的域以源域的结构和特征，从而达到出其不意的幽默效果。但并不是所有言语幽默的产生都是概念隐喻的结果。同样地，概念隐喻也更广泛地存在于除了言语幽默外的其他人类日常语言中。

Metaphor is a common linguistic phenomenon in human life. With the development of cognitive linguistics, researchers begin to study the relationships between metaphor and cognition. Lakoff and Johnson propose the famous Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and systematically study metaphor from a cognitive perspective. CMT challenges the traditional view of cognitive metaphor which considers metaphor as only a figure of speech. They believe that metaphors exist in every corner of human language and it is the basis of human conceptual system. This paper uses CMT to analyze the verbal humor in the American sitcom Friends. By analyzing the three types of conceptual metaphors, that is structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor in the sitcom Friends, this paper tries to find how conceptual metaphors contribute to the generating of verbal humor. This research finds that, through mapping, the target domain acquires some structures and features of the source domain, producing unexpected humorous effect. However, there are still many conceptual metaphors in the sitcom Friends that do not trigger off verbal humor. Conceptual metaphors are more widely used in our daily life than simply in the generating of humor.