Ananalysis Of The Verbal Humor Inamerican Sitcom Growing Pains From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Humor is very important in human life. As a human phenomenon, humor permeates every aspect of life, which is researched in many fields, such as philosophical field, psychological field, sociological field, anthropological field, linguistic field and educational field. In this paper, humor will be analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics. The fundamental theories are: Cooperative Theory, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory.American sitcom Growing Pains is a very popular play in the world. This research will use the e-text of this play as corpus to illustrate the humors created when the speakers violate the Cooperative Principle and the sub-principles: maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relation, and maxim of manner. , but Cooperative Principle can not explain humors created in the cognitive context, such as the limitation of the speakers'contextual ability, the wrong contextual assumption, and the misinfrence. The Relevance Theory can explain the humor produced by the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance, but it can not explain the irrelevant communication, that is to say, when the speaker is in the unbalanced mental situation, they ignore the hearer. The Relevance Theory can not give explanation about this phenomenon. Adaptation Theory can explain humor created by the over-adaptation and non-adaptation to the context, but it can not explain the humor produced by inference.By analysis, the conclusion can be made that the three theories can explain the humor production very well, but they have their own weaknesses. They can complement each other. The combination of the three theories can fully explain the humor phenomenon. Among them, Adaptation Theory is the most powerful one.