| Humor is a phenomenon peculiar to human beings. In our daily life, various types of humor in different forms of expression can be found which play an irreplaceable role in our social activities. "Sense of humor" even becomes a norm to evaluate a person's educational level and personality. So the research on humor has not only profound theoretical importance, but also practical use. In fact, early as in the 4th century B.C., Plato and Aristotle already paid attention to this special phenomenon. They made their research in the field of philosophy. Over the past 2,000 years since then, many researchers have studied and analyzed humor from different approaches of various disciplines, and advanced many theories on humor from different angles. To facilitate the analysis, the object of study in this paper only concentrates on the phenomenon of utterance humor in verbal communication.In traditional humor studies, IR theory is regarded as one of the most influential approaches. Although it is widely approved by many researchers, there always lacks a precise statement either of this theory or of its main concepts. In order to solve this problem, Graeme Ritchie, a senior lecturer from University of Edinburgh, issued his paper "Developing the incongruity-resolution theory" in 1999, in which he attempted to explain IR theory mainly by using "Surprise Disambiguation model" (SD model) which is constructed on his definitions of 3 entities (M1, M2, M3), their properties and their interrelations. According to his analysis, the conflicts of M3 with M1 or M3 with expectation are the two causes for the incongruity of jokes. Basing on this, he further formulated a joke processing model.On the other hand, humor studies in pragmatic field are also in the ascendant in recent years. However, since the theoretical bases of the researchers are generally limited to traditional pragmatic theories, most of their conclusions tend to be empirical ones.The birth of relevance theory in the 1980s marks the establishment of cognitive pragmatics and its pluralistic theoretical background provides us with a completely new scientific viewpoint for the study of utterance humor. But anyway, relevance theory is still a comparatively new theory with a history of not more than 20 years, few researchers have applied it to humor studies up to now.In this paper, starting from the scientific views of communicative inference, dynamic context and relevance, the author analyzes the cognitive (or generating) mechanism of utterance humor, and points out that the psychological stimulus caused by the gap between maximal and optimal relevance in utterances is the origin of humorous effect. He also finds that the two types of "conflict" concluded by SD model, which may lead to incongruity overlap. That is because Ritchie's understanding of utterance meaning has not reached the level of context. Then he further concludes the usual types of contextual effect that the punchline generally may have in the old contextual assumptions. In the final parts, through the combination of relevance theory with other two conventional humor theories - relief theory and superiority theory, the author discusses the laughter-making mechanism of utterance humor and the communicator's (or narrator's) motivation of making utterance humor. There are altogether 6 chapters in this article. Chapter one briefly introduces the definition and classification of humor, provides an overview of the previous studies and theories of humor, and also gives the readers a sketch of the development of pragmatics. The second chapter presents readers with the main idea of relevance theory and Ritchie's SD model. Chapter three discusses the cause of utterance humor based on relevance theory, points out that humorous effect is generated by the gap between maximal and optimal relevance. The author believes that the contextual effects the punchline may evolve in the old context of the set-up must include deletion of certain old contextual assumption; it may include strengthening certain newly extended assumption...
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