A Contrastive Analysis Of Humor In American Situation Comedy Friends: Cooperative Principle Vs. Relevance Theory

Humor reflects the speaker's wisdom and attitudes towards life and meanwhile it brings us great pleasure. It is also an important and useful means to resolve confrontation between people.The present study was a tentative exploration into the underlying mechanisms of humor found in American situation comedy Friends within the framework of the two theoretical perspectives—Grice's Cooperative Principle(CP) and Relevance Theory (RT).Humor has been a heated topic for scholars from different disciplines. But there is still no overwhelming definition which could satisfy those involved in the study of humor. The working definition for the present study is in a broad sense: all those that are laughable, amusing, funny can be called humor.The Cooperative Principle put forward by Grice is an important part of Pragmatics. Before Grice few linguists have investigated humor from the perspective of Pragmatics. The four maxims included in the Cooperative Principle are effective in the explanation of humor. Humor generates from the violations of four maxims: maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance and maxim of manner.Relevance Theory provides a new perspective for the analysis of humor. From the viewpoint of Relevance Theory, understanding humor is a cognitive process of searching for relevance. It is a process in which the hearer finds"relevance"in what seems"irrelevant". The communicative principle of relevance plays an essential role in guiding the process of humor interpretation.The two theories are different from each other in terms of their theoretical sources, theoretical models, inferential models, the definitions of meaning and the definitions of context, etc. They are also different in the interpretation of verbal humor.The marked differences in the interpretation of humor between the perspectives of Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theories lie in the generating mechanisms and in the interpretation of some figures of speech, of which metaphor and irony are explored in the present study.According to Grice, language humor arises from the violations of maxims of Cooperative Principle, especially the maxims of quality. It derives from the implication of people's conversation. Relevance Theory views that the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance is the source of humorous stimulus, and it may also be regarded as the generating mechanism (or cognitive mechanism) of utterance humor.In addition to the generating mechanism, the two theories differ from each other in the interpretation of some figures of speech. Cooperative Principle assumes that metaphor as well as irony is generated from the violation of the pragmatic maxims, especially the flouting the maxim of quality. In other words, humor is a kind of deviation;being deviant is an important feature of humor. However, metaphor and irony are viewed differently by Relevance Theory, according to which metaphor can be seen as a loose talk of its literal meaning and irony as an echoic use of one's experience. The hearer only seeks relevance from seemingly irrelevant facts.