A Study Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Friends From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Humor is an indispensable part in our lives, which can color our lives and makeour lives more beautiful. In both the writing and speaking forms in our dailycommunication, humor occupies a great part within. There are lots of ways to expressa certain humorous effect, among which verbal humor is the most common one.Verbal humor can be distinguished by its features, and during the long history ofhumor studying, there are lots of masterpieces of verbal humor studying. Thanks to allof the contributions from these scholars, people find that there exist strongconnections between applied linguistic and verbal humor. Verbal humor, as one of themost common ways of expressing humor phenomenon, often obtains one or morepragmatic features.Humor, as a commonly used language phenomenon, has been studied in differentfields by lots of scholars and professors. For example, in the fields of linguistic,aesthetics, psychology, sociology, philosophy and rhetoric, there are lots of scholarswho have devoted themselves in the field of verbal humor. The history of studyinghumor can be divided into three stages, from the most ancient classical theories ofhumor to the more recent academic theories of humor, and finally, to modernlinguistic theories like Grice’s CP. In the long history of the development of verbalhumor, there exist lots of scholars who have contributed a lot in the studying career.From the most ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle, to the more recent psychologistsFreud and Bergerson, all of these scholars have studied verbal humor from differentperspectives and raised different theories. Meanwhile, with the development ofpragmatics, more and more scholars study verbal humor from the perspective ofapplied linguistics, in which a great number of theories can be used to analyze verbalhumor phenomenon authoritatively and comprehensively, such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its related theories.Cooperative Principle was firstly proposed by Grice, and soon was wildlyaccepted in the field of pragmatics. In CP, Grice proposes his "four maxims", in whichthe violation of any of them will certainly lead to language implicature. Meanwhile,based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle, linguist Raskin and Yamaguchi connect verbalhumor to CP and propose "Humor-CP" and "Mention Theory". These two theories bothtake CP as the fundamental theory but study verbal humor from different perspectives.Raskin connects verbal humor to the four maxims in CP and finally proposes his newmaxims, which is called "Humor-CP". Although these four maxims share the samenames with Grice’s CP, their definitions differ a lot. Humor-CP is no longer a broadframework, and it overcomes the overlapping problems in CP. Moreover, Humor-CP ismore pertinent, which aims at verbal humor studying only. It is a supplement of CP,which is more concrete and directional. While Yamaguchi takes Grice’s CP as thetheoretic foundation, but studies verbal humor from the perspective of "who shouldviolate the maxims, the narrator or the character in the joke?". Compared to Grice,Yamaguchi studies CP from the perspective of narrator, listener and the character in thejoke, which makes his theory much more comprehensive.The author in this paper will connect verbal humor to pragmatics. And the authorwill hire samples from the American sitcom Friends which is considered to be one ofthe most popular sitcoms in20thcentury to analyze verbal humor from the perspectiveof Grice’s CP. In the end of this paper, firstly, the author hopes to find out the mostcommonly used way of expression in any humorous phenomenon; secondly, the authorexplains the conditions and mechanisms of creating a humorous effect; and finally, theauthor testifies the explanations of the linguistic theories toward samples of verbalhumor in daily communication. The author will turn to Internet resource and DVD tocollect all the samples for the detailed analysis, and later, the author will hire charts,comparisons, data analysis and so forth to invest all the humor samples. Afterinvestigation, the author finds that the cooperative principle and its related theories canexplain most verbal humor examples in Friends, and pragmatics can help people tohave a better understanding of verbal humor.