Relevance Theory And Verbal Humor Understanding

Humor is everywhere in our daily life. Nowadays the study of humor has already become a special and independent discipline. In recent years, the theories of pragmatics now sharpen our eyes and widen our horizon in humor studies. This paper, based on the fruitful studies of humor, attempts to investigate the English verbal humors from the play The Importance of Being Earnest in the framework of relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995).In relevance theory, a mental search for an optimally relevant interpretation covers the processing of verbal humor and the derivation of humorous effects. "Extra effort means extra effects." (Wilson, 1999:52) When the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance is extremely different from, or incongruous with the speaker's actual utterance of optimal relevance, humorous effects accompanied by misunderstanding occur. By means of data analysis from The Importance of Being Earnest, we depict the process as follows: in humorous communication, the hearer at first finds out that the utterance is incongruous and irrelevant. Driven by the expectation of relevance, he assumes that this irrelevance is apparent and further infers implicit meanings or attitudes conveyed by the utterance, such as being optimistic, mocking and playful. On this basis, I argue that verbal humor can be characterized as relevant incongruity. This is seen not only in humorous figurative utterances such as metaphor, irony, and pun, but also in non-figurative language too.In all the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure applies to every aspect of interpretation, verbal humor included. Verbal humor interpretation is not a deviant process. Only in verbal humor, the perception of incongruity leads to an increasing effort with more corresponding cognitive effects resulted.